The Shades Of Blue In The Great Gatsby

The Shades of Blue When Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, he mentions the word blue. Blue, is a term people use when describing not only a shade, but an emotion. When using the word blue in context with The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald uses it to symbolize hope, sadness, ambition, and illusion. By describing certain characters, settings, and objects as various shades of blue, Fitzgerald is highlighting the false hopes and illusions of grandeur that marked the 1920s in which he lived and explored through literature with The Great Gatsby. In addition, Fitzgerald showed the hope that people had to the future. He used the following quote from page 118 to prove this. “Slowly the white wings of the boat moved against the blue cool limit of the sky.” The white wings show wealth and power, while the blue shows Gatsby’s future ambition. In a way it’s a comparison against old vs. new. The white shows the older money, the natural born elegance. While the blue represents Gatsby’s hope for being included with certain people and the social class. No matter how hard Gatsby tries with his level of luxury he can only hope of being like that.

For instance, he goes on the theme of sadness for some of the book. On page 92, he shows this by slipping it into the littlest things. “While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher-shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue.” In the novel, Fitzgerald makes it obvious that Gatsby is brokenhearted without Daisy, and tries everything to get her to notice him. By mentioning that he shows his blue shirt to Daisy it proves that he still has sorrow and imperfections under wealthy and beautiful