Color Symbolism In The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald

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There are many different colors that the eye can see. This includes red, which represents danger, or green which means money or being safe and security. In The Great Gatsby, color symbolism plays an important role throughout the novel. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald uses many different color symbolisms within the novel including many colors such as, Gold, White, silver , Green, and Red.
Gold throughout the novel gold is considered the symbol of wealth, and money. All people want to have is an abundance of money or, the “American Dream”. Zhang Habing explains this throughout his article titled “Symbolic meaning of colors in The Great Gatsby”, “Throughout the novel, it can be seen that the most common color accompanying with Gatsby is yellow… Yellow is the color of gold, which symbolizes money, materialism and high social position.” (p. 42) The dream of all people in any time period present past or future is to have a lot …show more content…

A great example is Jay Gatsby's dock, “He stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward – and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.” (Fitzgerald 7) The green light at the end of the dock can be represented as hope and the future to come. Green is a constant reoccurring color in the novel and also represents wealth, when the people who go to parties use a green ticket to enter. The green represents money at an extremely rich and fancy nightclub. Lastly, “the green color runs throughout the whole novel, and it is closely related to Gatsby’s short life. So it symbolizes Gatsby’s original dream and hope” (p. 41) Gatsby lived a short but luxurious life filled with potential and hope originally, until his encounter with Daisy, Tom, George, and many other characters, who got him into trouble with already married

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