Color Symbolism In The Great Gatsby

The flourishing 1920s were an amazing time full of wealth. F Scott Fitzgerald depicted that in the story “The Great Gatsby”. The main character great Gatsby is searching for his past love, Daisy. Gatsby lived across the lake in west egg, but every night he looks out across the lake and sees that green lantern and realizes that there is still hope. Through the empty lives of the three characters from this novel- George Wilson, Jay Gatsby, and Daisy Buchanan-Fitzgerald shows that chasing hollow dreams leads only to misery.
Colors can be symbolic of countless different things. Artists take this actuality into consideration when selecting the colors they use in their artwork; as these colors are used to generate emotions within their audience.
Identical to an artist, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses light and color in his masterpiece to create flow and harmony. There is, however, an additional, deeper reason for his use of light and color symbolism. Fitzgerald uses lights and colors to highlight the central conflict, Gatsby and Daisy's relationship.
The first of the many colors used in the novel is white. The first time Nick meets Daisy and Jordan "they were both in white" (Fitzgerald 12). White, in American civilization, is usually associated with innocence. This reality Fitzgerald uses "to underscore the ironic disparity between the ostensible purity...and their actual corruption" (Schneider 1). Nonetheless this color also shows the innocence of Gatsby's dream. "To wear white is to be 'an absolute little dream'" (Schneider 1) and the dream to Gatsby is to have Daisy.
The dream is also represented by two other colors: blue and green.
The meaning of the color blue becomes understandable with the line: "In his blue gardens, men and women came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars" (Fitzgerald 43). Here blue is associated with flights of the imagination and dream-like parties. Subsequently, in Chapter VII white and blue are connected: "Slowly the white wings of the boat moved against the blue cool limit of the sky" (Fitzgerald 124). White and blue "become the symbols of the ultimate bliss" (Schneider 1). However, these colors, just as Gatsby and Daisy's relationship, do not keep their purity as the novel
continues.
One of the most noticeable of the symbols for Gatsby and Daisy's relationship is the green light.
The green light, which is representative of the American Dream, also represents everything Gatsby wants with Daisy. Half of green is blue, which is the perfect life the Gatsby sees possible with Daisy. It is the happiness he had with Daisy as a young man. However, Gatsby does not perceive the other half of green which is yellow. Yellow, just as in the Christian religion, is representative of greed and wealth. "Gatsby, seeking the blue, is blind to the sordid yellow" (Schneider 1). Yellow is the money in Daisy’s voice; it is the difference in class that will always keep them apart. It is this yellow that will be one of the two things that will represent the end of Gatsby and Daisy's
relationship.
Just as yellow taints the blue turning it to green, it also taints the white. In the beginning of The Great Gatsby, Gatsby's car is "a rich cream color" (Fitzgerald 68) which is unfortunately "white...fuse inevitably with yellow" (Schneider 1). Towards the end of the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy, when Daisy kills Myrtle, is when a witness describes Gatsby's car saying, "It was a yellow car" (Fitzgerald 147), no longer cream. This is when Daisy almost kills the dream for she "is transformed into the money-stained, dream girl" (Schneider 1), "the golden girl" (Fitzgerald 127). In this sense Daisy truly is a daisy; beautiful white petals but a bright yellow stigma.
Right after the reader learns of the accident caused by Daisy is when the two final colors, red and pink, are shown for what they are. Red, at the end of The Great Gatsby, is associated with violence and death as shown with Myrtle's "thick dark blood" (Fitzgerald 145) spilling onto the ground. Furthermore just as yellow is mixed with white and blue so does red taint the purity of the colors. In the line, "His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color against the white steps," (Fitzgerald 162) shows how Gatsby has almost come to terms with the violence within the "innocent" Daisy yet "he was clutching at some last hope" (Fitzgerald 155) still. This hope is only severed with the final mixing of colors: red and blue. There is only one major joining of these colors in the text and it is when Gatsby is shot while in his pool. The reader gets the image of Gatsby’s corpse still bleeding floating in the pool. This last mixing of colors is the metaphorical killing of the dream. Gatsby has found out "what a grotesque thing a rose is" (Fitzgerald 169). For with all the beauty the flower, Daisy, could possible hold the harsh reality is it still has sharp thorns, wealth.
Besides light and dark symbolism Fitzgerald utilizes the colors white, blue, green, yellow, red, and pink in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald's use of green may be the most obvious but it is the other colors that better express the conflict of the novel. By using the lighting and colors alone then the matching of and eventual mixing of the pairs of colors gives the novel a flow that shows the rise, climax, and end of Gatsby and Daisy's relationship. This novel is a tremendously vibrant novel in the sense that the author used many different colors to cover many aspects of Gatsby and Daisy’s relationship.
Every single color makes a difference and highlights a different aspect of The Great Gatsby. Color is a significant part of this piece of literature. Fitzgerald's use of color symbolism is amazing yet well concealed. Colors have as many meanings as there are human beings who exist upon this earth. Nevertheless, there cannot be blue without yellow and there is no white without red.