But in Gatsby’s mind, the white does not exist pure, it is stained by the money, the yellow. White traditionally symbolizes purity but it was researched that Fitzgerald wanted us to see the ironic play between the “ostensible purity”(Piper 146) of Daisy and Jordan and their actual corruption. Getting back to the light-dark symbolism, it is revealed that when Daisy and Jordan are first introduced they are dressed in all white. These conjunctions of white and yellow exhibit the contrast between the dream and the reaity.
He realizes that the glow is not of enchantment but that of money. He says he is like a “casual watcher.” “looking up and wondering”(Piper 147) at “our line of yellow windows”(Piper 147) in the “long white cake of apartment houses.” “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”(Piper 147) From “without,” the windows glow with the dream but inside the apartments Nick observes only greed. The yellow is first identified when Nick describes his life in the east. We observe the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock -the symbol of the “orgiastic future,”(Piper 145) the promise of the dream Gatsby pursues to its end familiar also with the “ubiquitous yellow”(Piper 145)-symbol of the money, the materialism that corrupts the dream and destroys it. Also noticed was the grotesque valley of ashes- rightly stated by one critic as being “the sordid reality lying beneath the fictions of the American dream of limitless Opportunity and Achievement.”(Piper 145) Which expresses a pattern of light-dark symbolism. Gatsby’s shirts are described as “coral, and apple-green and lavender and faints orange, with monograms of Indian blue,”(Piper 145) thus Proving that Gatsby’s world was like a fantasy. Nick describes Gatsby: “like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light.”(Piper 145) Nick also sees Gatsby as “a universe of ineffable gaudiness”(Piper 145) – a world represented in the book by all the colors of the rainbow.
As was researched, the colors represent both the dream and the reality. The range of the color-symbols and their complex operations at each stage of action is escaped from the readers. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing is probably nowhere more exhibited than in his handling of the color-symbols in The Great Gatsby. Color-Symbolism In The Great Gatsby Essay, Research Paper
0 kommentar(er)
