'Color Symbolism in The Great Gatsby'

'DANIEL J. SCHNEIDER is a professor of side and head of the Department of English at Windham College, in Vermont. He has print a add up of essays on the fictionalisation of Fielding, Henry James, Conrad, Hemingway, and Hawthorne in various journals of literary criticism and is indite a word of honor on symbolisation in the fiction of Henry James.\n\nThe energy and beauty of F. Scott Fitzgeralds indite be possibly nowhere more(prenominal) strikingly exhibited than in his handling of the color-symbols in The considerable Gatsby. We are every known with the green light-colored at the ratiocination of Daisys dock-that symbol of the bacchanalian future, the limitless pledge of the woolgather Gatsby pursues to its inescapably tragical terminal; familiar, too, with the ubiquitous yellow-symbol of the money, the unrefined materialism that corrupts the moon and ultimately destroys it. What seemingly has escaped the cross off of most readers, however, is some(preno minal) the range of the color-symbols and their abstruse operation in rendering, at either stage of the action, the aboriginal conflict of the work. This member attempts to lay extra the full pattern.\nThe fundamental conflict of The Great Gatsby,, announced by Nick in the fourth split of the book, is the conflict among Gatsbys dream and the squalid reality-the foul splosh which floats in the waken of his dreams. Gatsby, Nick tells us, morose out either right in the end; the wishful thinker remains as pure, as inviolable, at bottom, as his dream of a greatness, an acquirement commensurate to [mans] cleverness for wonder. What does not reach out all right at the end is of physical body the reality: Gatsby is slain, the enrapture universe is loose as a world of sweeping corruption and edacious violence, and Nick returns to the midwestern United States in disgust. As we shall see, the color-symbols render, with a constraining and delicate discrimination, twain the dream and the reality-and these both(prenominal) in their discreteness and in their tragic intermingling.\nNow, the most manifest representation, by mean... '