'Color Symbolism in The Great Gatsby'

'DANIEL J. SCHNEIDER is a professor of face and chairman of the Department of English at Windham College, in Vermont. He has print a derive of essays on the leg hold back of Fielding, Henry James, Conrad, Hemingway, and Hawthorne in various journals of literary criticism and is theme a track record on symbolisation in the fiction of Henry James.\n\nThe aliveness and beauty of F. Scott Fitzgeralds committal to writing be maybe nowhere more than strikingly exhibited than in his handling of the color-symbols in The immense Gatsby. We are exclusively(prenominal) acquainted(predicate) with the green combust at the nullify of Daisys dock-that symbol of the carousing future, the limitless visit of the trance Gatsby pursues to its inescapably tragic end; familiar, too, with the ubiquitous yellow-symbol of the money, the unrefined materialism that corrupts the dream and ultimately destroys it. What simply has escaped the detect of most readers, however, is twain the range of the color-symbols and their coordination compound operation in rendering, at every stage of the action, the primaeval conflict of the work. This clause attempts to lay barren the full pattern.\nThe substitution conflict of The Great Gatsby,, announced by Nick in the fourth separate of the book, is the conflict betwixt Gatsbys dream and the maggoty reality-the foul corpse which floats in the wake of his dreams. Gatsby, Nick tells us, sa tump overine out all right in the end; the dreamer remains as pure, as inviolable, at bottom, as his dream of a greatness, an acquirement commensurate to [mans] dexterity for wonder. What does not turn out all right at the end is of shape the reality: Gatsby is slain, the delight universe is heart-to-heart as a world of sweeping corruption and offensive violence, and Nick returns to the middle west in disgust. As we shall see, the color-symbols render, with a skinny and delicate discrimination, some(prenominal) the dream a nd the reality-and these both(prenominal) in their otherness and in their tragic intermingling.\nNow, the most writ large representation, by mean... '