‘Symbolism Is Central to the Meaning and Effects of the Great Gatsby.’

Writing just a few years after the end of the Great War, Fitzgerald takes as his theme the hedonism of a materialistic society in which spiritual values are dead. His eponymous hero throws parties on Sundays (to which ‘the world and its mistress’ flocked) because he hopes that Daisy, the object of his faith, hope and love, will come to him. In her absence, he stretches out his arms towards the green light at the end of her dock and, as Fitzgerald makes repeated references to it, that light becomes like a religious icon to him, a symbol of his hope of a new life with Daisy. To the reader, however, the green light comes to symbolise his naivety in thinking that the past can be repeated. At the end of the novel, the narrator observes that ‘Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us’, suggesting that it represented the orgasm, the intensity of experience, which is forever beyond reach. Just before this reference, Nick was imagining how the Dutch sailors felt when they first arrived in America and saw ‘a fresh green breast of the new world’. By juxtaposing the green breast and the green light, Fitzgerald makes the green light a symbol of the American
Dream, rooted in the past, but beckoning from the unattainable future. Those who pursue it do so at the expense of the values of a caring society. Those who seem to have achieved it, like Tom and Daisy, are living in a moral vacuum which destroys any hope of happiness.
Whether they travel to the city by car or by train, Tom and Daisy have to pass the valley of ashes with its massive advertisement for Dr T. J. Eckleburg. These huge eyes brood over the novel, as Nick keeps commenting on them and Wilson equates them with the eyes of God. Through this symbol, Fitzgerald specifically suggests that, in post-war New THE GREAT GATSBY
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