What Does The Gold Symbolize In The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald is an author who is acclaimed for using a great deal of symbolism in his literature to illustrate and help readers understand the meanings of his work. Fitzgerald used many symbols in his novel The Great Gatsby which gave the story a whole new meaning in the sense that it has many underlying interpretations of the symbols. The story follows Jay Gatsby, a man who has one desire in life: to be reunited with his “golden girl” Daisy Buchanan, the love that he had lost five years earlier. Gatsby’s journey takes him from aridity to prosperity, into the arms of his treasured Daisy, and eventually his death. Fitzgerald’s use of the similarity in the colors gold and yellow in The Great Gatsby emphasize how wealth, social class, and the people in them are not as different as they may seem.
The use of gold and yellow are prominent in the story,

There is a billboard that overlooks the Valley of Ashes, which is a very dark and dreary place in the novel. “They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose,” (Fitzgerald 27). The glasses are yellow because they are looking over the wasteland of America and it is not good enough for gold. The color yellow may represent a lesser version of gold like when Fitzgerald mentions “two girls in twin yellow dresses who stopped at the foot of the steps,” (Fitzgerald 47). Gatsby sees these two girls as being too easy and they are not as good as Daisy or Jordan because they do not have the pizzazz. The yellow also can describe the repeal that Gatsby goes through when he becomes very wealthy to please Daisy, and then he dies and it is most likely all for nothing. When Fitzgerald said, “he shook his head and in a moment disappeared among the yellowing trees,” (Fitzgerald 55), it was almost foreshadowing Gatsby’s