Colors have a remarkable ability to affect mood and emotions in everyday life. Usage of colors helps to convey certain feelings without any spoken words needed. Color is used throughout literature to communicate with the reader and to develop an atmosphere. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald utilizes colors to symbolize specific characters and to inject a sense of emotion into scenes. There is an array of colors used throughout the novel, but the most prominent colors are white, black, and blue. White as used in The Great Gatsby is a symbol for purity, innocence, and status. White is the color typically surrounding Daisy Buchanan. For instance, when Nick visits Daisy’s house he notes, “Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay” (Fitzgerald 6). Using white here not only shows Daisy’s purity in the choice of color, but the way she contrasts from her husband Tom. Tom being the red portion of the house …show more content…
Daisy is seen as a higher being in Gatsby’s eyes but he not on only wants to obtain Daisy, he wants to be seen at her level of status. To illustrate, “High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl” (Fitzgerald 120). By mentioning Daisy in a “white palace” this shows that Daisy is unobtainable to someone like Gatsby. Gatsby has new money and will never be seen in the same way that Daisy is. This also foreshadows the fact that Daisy will never leave Tom because she is secure in her “palace” and being with Gatsby could jeopardize her status. White is a status symbol for Tom as well, considering he sees white people as the dominant race. Tom thinks that minorities or black people are rising up too much in society. This showcases Tom’s unlikable personality and fear of being upstaged by a lower class. “White” to Tom means old money and Tom shows little respect to people who actually have to work for
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, The Great Gatsby, exposes the corruption and greed of the Roaring Twenties. Fitzgerald is able to captivate readers' attentions through his employment of color symbolism. Fitzgerald portrays important messages in the novel by his symbolic use of colors. Colors play an important role in Fitzgerald’s descriptions of the lives of Jay Gatsby, Nick Carraway and many of the other characters in the novel. Fitzgerald uses the colors white, yellow, and green to express certain sentiments to the reader, commenting what is going on in the story. Fitzgerald uses the color white to symbolize purity and innocence, while yellow is used to symbolize moral decay, and death. Green is used to represent hope and
Daisy is often written to go along with the color white, which most first associate it with purity and innocence, as white is often used to represent. By the end of the story, the reader sees Daisy for who she truly is, as she skips Gatsby’s funeral the reader can see the white to represent a voidness, emptiness, and lack of consciousness. The reader now
Colors have a large impact on society. They have the ability to affect people’s moods, appetites, and behaviors. Colors also have the ability to act as symbols. For example, the color white often acts as a symbol of innocence, and the color yellow often represents happiness. Throughout the book The Great Gatsby, multiple colors symbolize different aspects of Jay Gatsby’s life.
When F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby, he was not only working as a writer, he was an artist painting a piece through his words. While making the lives of fictional characters come to life for the reader, one of the main tools he used to do this was by using the symbolism of colors. Nick Carraway, the main character, befriends many of the wealthiest and corrupt people of Long Island, while exposing them for what they truly are in the journeys he endures with them. His extravagant use of colors to illustrate scenes and characters helps us determine the symbolism behind them, and how they’re used to expose the true personalities of the characters.
Crime, romance, tragedy. These qualities put together have the ability to make a fascinating book, but when taking a close look, one can find that there is more to it than that. In The Great Gatsby, colors and their connotations add another level of understanding to the book by symbolizing different social classes while creating imagery and adding to the reader's understanding of a dream. Most every color can be categorized through its connotations to the social classes they represent, mainly the old rich, new rich, and lower class. Everyday objects can all hold a deeper meaning when looking at something as simple as the color.
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, has deeper information hidden by colors all over the book. Each color has its own significant meaning and connects to the story in some way. From nearly all the colors on the rainbow to the color grey, there is a connection between these buried meanings behind all of the colors. Green is the most important color throughout the book because of special meanings and roles it plays on all of the characters. The color green relates to wealth and success on almost all of the characters. Gatsby is the one who brings this color to life and connects with it to show how it takes part in this story.
The author of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, reveals the issues of money, happiness, and the unattainable which separated the privileged and unprivileged. Fitzgerald hints to the reader numerous times of the issues of money and how it can ultimately affect a character's life. The main character of The Great Gatsby, demonstrate the struggle of the 20s and how somethings can be within arms reach but cannot be grasped. All throughout the novel, Jay Gatsby, struggles to keep, Daisy Buchanan, the woman he loves, happy enough. Due to the separation of money, Gatsby is identified as a man of “new money”, this makes it hard for Gatsby to achieve his dream of reuniting with Daisy. The color green is used to show Gatsby’s dream and how he struggles to obtain the unobtainable. He hints poverty and hopelessness through the color gray. The author presents the color white in order to expose the true nature of Daisy Buchanan and the privileges of living in the west egg. Fitzgerald uses colors to symbolize the inequality between social classes of the 1920s, ultimately proving that money does not guarantee happiness.
In general, the color white symbolizes innocence, purity, and cleanliness. In the novel, the color white is closely associated with Daisy. “White, even after one excludes near-synonyms such as silver, makes more appearances in the novel than any other single color, and something like three of every four are applied to East Egg or characters from East Egg, especially to Daisy” (Elmore 428). This quote proves that the color white contributes to a major theme in the novel. Daisy wears white to show her innocence. The first time Nick sees Daisy and Jordan, they are both wearing white. Nick describes seeing the women in the quote, “They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house” (Fitzgerald 8). It was the women, so magical and light, like birds or butterflies that flew around the house. They could fly, but they didn't fly far, only around the house which they got blown back into. These women don't have much ambition or power on their own. They are housebound, even though they can fly. In the beginning of the novel, the reader believes Daisy is innocent. Even her name Daisy is a kind of white flower. When introduced to her for the first time, people feel that she is pure, flawless, and noble. This is one of the reasons Gatsby is infatuated with her throughout his life and regards her as a pure beauty. The
What does the color green make you think of? Do you think of beautiful forests home to unique animals and intricate ecosystems? Do you think of fresh ripe kiwi in the summer? Do you think of broccoli ,which takes the cake as the most hated vegetable by children under 8? A lot of times people see colors very basically and don’t think about the connotation or symbolism behind them Fitzgerald is the contrary. He uses colors throughout the novel as a way to express his ideas in a more interpretive way that cause the reader to really analyze the novel, The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald converges Gatsby's primary motivations with the use of the color green, a symbol that represents both wealth, money, the chase of the American dream and ,on the flip-side, a renewal and revival of his and Daisy’s relationship. Fitzgerald shows green in its many lights, from the physical representation of wealthy, to wealths grasp on an individual who idolizes it, to its freshness in relation to a new frontier to the American dream.
In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, colors are one of the most important details in the book. Throughout the story Fitzgerald cleverly uses colors in order to focus on specific themes and characters. He wrote this book in a way where one can read it for pleasure, and where one could analyze it and truly appreciate the work that he has put into this book. Every color has a specific meaning which correlates with each of the characters. Specifically, gold represents wealth, high class, selfishness, and relationships; while white represents honesty, purity, innocence, and a symbol for surrendering.
Colors are an essential part of the world around us. They can convey messages, expressing that which words do not. Gentle blue tones can calm a person and bright yellows can lift the spirits. If an artist is trying to express sorrow or death he often uses blacks blues, and grays basically he uses dreary colors. Without one word, a driver approaching a red traffic light knows to stop. Colors are representative of many things. In his novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses color symbolism throughout as a major device in thematic and character development. He uses colors to symbolize the many different intangible ideas in the book. Throughout the book characters, places, and objects are given "life" by colors, especially the more
Color imagery in The Great Gatsby is vital to the books storyline. If there was no color imagery then the reader could not associate a certain person or thing with a color or idea. Fitzgerald uses the color so people can remember the person more than just their name. The use of color imagery greatly impacts the story line.
In The Great Gatsby, the motif of the color white develops the irony of who Daisy is. This became evident at Daisy’s house when she was found, “lay[ing] upon an enormous couch like [a] silver idol, weighing down [her] own white dress against the singing breeze of the fans” (122). The author creates an image of an angel dressed in their habitual white gown with flowing body portions. The color white is associated with purity, innocence, new beginnings and stimulates growth. This emphasises on Daisy’s current life events.
White is colour at its most complete and pure, the colour of perfection. The colour meaning of white is purity, innocence, wholeness and completion. The colour white was introduced into the novel when Daisy was described as wearing a white dress. The dress showed her as having a pure and innocent personality. It was actually ironic that she wore white because the reader knows of her true characteristics, even though she was represented as lovable character in the book and as well as the movie. The white covered the fact that she was having an affair with Gatsby. White can also sometimes symbolize honesty, which is something Nick looked for in people. The narrator and Gatsby were both honest men and became friends because of it. Nick stopped dating Jordan Baker
During the 1920’s, many people would disguise themselves through the identities of someone else. In the novel, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the main characters can be seen “hiding” behind the symbolism of different colors. Color affects the mood, emphasizes the importance of events in a novel, and can also interact with the personalities of the characters. The concept of color symbolism is prominent in the novel. White, yellow, blue, green, and even the color black affect the atmosphere of scenes through association with a specific mood, and also through the actions of the characters.