Color In The Great Gatsby Essay

Improved Essays
Colors have a much deeper meaning that we tend to overlook. The use of colors in the novel The Great Gatsby is very congruous with the rest of the novel. All of the characters and their actions can be compared to a color. These colors include blue which symbolizes sadness, green for hope, gold or yellow for wealth, and gray for poverty or depression. The color blue in this story symbolizes sadness. It is mostly associated with Mr. Gatsby and is longing for his lost love, Daisy. “He had come a long way to his blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it” (Fitzgerald 180). This quote is said on the very last page of the book after everything had played out. After Gatsby was killed and had never fully reached his dream. The first part of the quote, “He had come a long way to his blue lawn,” is saying how far he had come to fulfilling his dream. He constructed his fortune in a matter of three years and he had purposefully built his house across the bay from Daisy. The last part of the quote, “and his dream …show more content…
It is mostly associated with Gatsby and his hope to be with Daisy. Nick Carraway, the narrator and Gatsby’s neighbor and close friend, compares the aspirations of old, adventurous sailors as they travel to a new world, to that of Gatsby. “I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes-a fresh green breast of the new world” (Fitzgerald 180). The Dutch sailors came to this island and had nothing but opportunity. They saw it as the answer to their problems and where they could make all of their dreams come true. A place where they could be reborn and start over. Gatsby came to this place for all of the same reasons. He was looking to pursue a new life with his beloved Daisy who had been longing to reconnect with after five agonizing years. He built up all of his riches after moving to New York and started a new life across the bay from his

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Because the author uses the color blue to discuss the gardens in Gatsby’s yard, negative connotation is used to set the mood for readers. Therefore, the blue represents that Gatsby’s house has been a sorrowful place for many years. The romantic blue is obviously associated with the “promise, the dream that Gatsby has mistaken for reality” (Schneider). Gatsby is so unhappy because he keeps dreaming that he can find a way to be with Daisy again, but his reach for this reality, is only such a fantasy. When the realization begins to hit him that he may never get back with her again, he becomes even more depressed.…

    • 1630 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    The rhetorical devices used in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, portrays the flaws in Jay Gatsby’s ability to attain an American Dream that, ultimately, kills him. This reveals the reality that many Americans experience while attempting to attain their dreams due to the hardships they encounter. Fitzgerald conveys these difficulties through Nick’s final reflection of Gatsby’s American Dream. He recurringly uses color symbolism to amplify the central message: living in the past results in fatal failure. Fitzgerald communicates that Gatsby’s American Dream was incoherent, as one cannot recreate the past.…

    • 1394 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock”(Fitzgerald 98). This famous quote is one of many ways that F. Scott Fitzgerald used colors in his popular novel The Great Gatsby. Color symbolism is a branch of the Archetypal lense that uses colors to describe different people and their personalities throughout literature. Colors, including green, yellow, white, and red are used to symbolise hope, caution, innocence, and anger through what people see, the cars they drive, what they wear, and how they live in the Great Gatsby.…

    • 1368 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “he had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it” (Fitzgerald, 180) . This quotation supports my argument because it was another way on how he tried to get the attention of Daisy or another way he was in pursuit of the green light. However the color blue also reveals that he was lonely at times because he wanted Daisy. You have to remember that Gatsby did not have many friends they all just used him for his house and had no clue who he actually was. “The blue tone of Gatsby’s loneliness and melancholy in his inner heart.…

    • 1653 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In F. Scott Fitzgerald novel The Great Gatsby red is seen as power which many people do not have but they will try to mimic it to the best of their abilities. In actuality, they are just trying to run from the fact that everything around them is yellow which reality is. Then on top of running from reality and trying to hold such power that they can never reach many people will try and act very innocent like they have never done a terrible thing in their entire life, however they are doing exactly what the people who do not power are doing, running from their reality. Fitzgerald uses the colors red, white, and yellow to show the significance of why people do certain, say certain and act a certain In the novel red means power, but many people…

    • 1944 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The 1920’s was the decade that roared, F. Scott Fitzgerald liked to call it “the greatest, gaudiest spree in history”. In Fitzgerald’s novel T he Great Gatsby w e are introduced to the opulent lives of some wealthy east coasters during one of the craziest time periods in American history. All of which they are striving for the American Dream. Fitzgerald uses symbolism throughout his novel to add layers of richness to his message.…

    • 1071 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Throughout the novel, Fitzgerald uses blue to symbolize the unhappiness within the characters. In the novel, Gatsby mentions that he longs for Daisy and felt desolate since she belongs to another man. The gigantic blue eyes of T.J. Eckleburg billboard sees the shameful acts done by the characters to display disappointment. At the beginning and as well as the end of the novel, Fitzgerald includes the green color to indicate destiny has granted Gatsby a green light to pursue his dreams. The color green in the novel portrays Gatsby’s hope for a new beginning.…

    • 610 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Great Gatsby Color

    • 590 Words
    • 3 Pages

    “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter - to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning - So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (Fitzgerald 152-153). In this essay, with 5 paragraphs, I will be telling how Fitzgerald uses color to tell a story; I will be focusing on 1 character with 3 different colors. In the book the The Great Gatsby, the author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, makes the character Gatsby symbolize the colors yellow (for caution), Red (for love, passion, and danger), and green (for growth).…

    • 590 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The color blue can mean a number of things in The Great Gatsby. Blue can represent sadness, poverty, or the blue- collared working class. First off, the color blue clearly represents sadness. Most people connect the color blue to the emotion of sadness because of various expressions or sayings; and because of many characters or instances in history, media, and literature. In the novel, there are multiple blue symbols used to set a sad or depressing mood in a particular scene or character.…

    • 1774 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The unreachable entity that surrounds the characters and the themes within “The Great Gatsby” are represented by the color gold. F. Scott Fitzgerald captures the brilliant wealth and success that each character strives for, but may not ever completely reach, by the character’s reflection through color. Author Kevin Rea states in his article entitled The colour of meaning in The Great Gatsby that“The party 's blend of yellow (hope) and gold (money worship) is significant. It is this quintessentially American mixture which proves to be the undoing of both the protagonist and his nation.” (Paragraph 15)…

    • 1468 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Blue is not a very happy and cheerful color, but instead it is dark and gloomy. This mostly applies to Gatsby’s life because he never really had any true friends, all of his parties were full of random people that no one even knew, “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went,” (Fitzgerald 41). Gatsby had people walking through his house that he didn’t even know because he wanted to get Daisy to go to one of the parties. So his parties were all meaningless until one night when he met Nick Carraway, which eventually led up to Daisy actually showing up to one of his parties. On another token blue can also be associated with death, “After Myrtle’s death George Wilson and Mr. Michaelis are in a blue mood,” (Fitzgerald 151).…

    • 1480 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Great Gatsby was written by Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. In this novel, there are many examples of color symbolism. Colors play a big role in what is going on in the book. Sometimes it may be hard to pick out, but it is there. They can represent many different things.…

    • 447 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    F.Scott Fitzgerald uses colors in The Great Gatsby such as Gold, Grey, and white. Grey represented the color of either emptiness or hopelessness. The color white represented the Innocence of someone and purity. The Great Gatsby has colors that uses how people feel or how they act. As the color gold represents old money or just rich for me.…

    • 325 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the colors green, gold, and grey to symbolically show the wealth in the American dream, which ultimately proves to be shallow and false, these colors also represent Gatsby’s quest to obtain the American Dream to impress…

    • 1440 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    It represents illusion, depression, unhappiness and things of that nature. Trent Lorcher’s article on Bright Hub Education also agreed in the fact that blue represents illusion in the story. A quote near the end of the book assists in proving this fact. Referring to Gatsby’s death and burial, Nick says at the end of the novel that, “he had come a long way to this blue lawn” (pg. 180). Nick uses the word “blue” in its most widely known meaning when referring to an emotion.…

    • 1437 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays