What Does The Light Symbolize In The Great Gatsby

In Chapter Five of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald uses symbolism with colors and weather to convey the intensity of Daisy and Gatsby’s relationship. Daisy has ignored her emotions and her memories regarding Gatsby for the five years they have not seen each other; however, Gatsby and Daisy meet for the first time in an explosion of emotions and past experiences. When Daisy arrives to Nick’s slight cottage, Fitzgerald creates an image of her stepping out of her car beneath “dripping bare lilac trees” in her “three-cornered lavender hat” and her “bright ecstatic smile” while Gatsby is wearing a “white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie” but is “pale as death” and his eyes reveal “dark signs of sleeplessness” as he is “standing in a puddle of …show more content…
Gatsby’s suit is gold, silver, and white, representing his exclusive status and his desire for Daisy to think of him because she is both beautiful and dressed in a lavender outfit with a three-cornered hat, giving off her usual high-class and feminine personality. When Nick returns after removing himself from the obviously private encounter, Daisy and Gatsby have regained their relationship from five years before and Gatsby has regained his self-pride along with Daisy’s acceptance. Nick comments on the weather and the “twinkle bells of sunshine in the room” and compares Gatsby to a weatherman or an “ecstatic patron of recurrent light”; Nick tags along with Daisy and Gatsby to go to Gatsby’s house described as “coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange” and as Daisy looks out a window she notices a “pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea”