Great Gatsby Color Symbolism

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“Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected” (Robert Frank). Color means a variety of many things to us. It can affect our mood, tells us things in a way we can not physically say, and can give us different feelings. In The Great Gatsby, it uses all the colors that we know, but F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the colors as a way for us to understand his characters in a deeper way of just giving a description. To us, yellow means earning a lot of money, and high social power. Gold can be considered the color of a lot of luxury. Green can symbolize hope, confidence, wealth, and envy. The way he uses the colors to symbolize his characters brings us into …show more content…

Hope, money, confidence is one of the three main things that symbolize green. Daisy once said to Jay “Rich girls don’t marry poor boys” (Fitzgerald p. 127). Gatsby was already in love with Daisy, so Gatsby would do anything for her anyway. Her saying this made Gatsby’s desire to be rich and throw extravagant parties to impress her to fall in love with the man she always wanted. In the beginning of the novel, we learn that Jay is in love with the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Before Jay went off to war, him and Daisy dated and were in love. Once Jay finally back, after leaving Oxford, Daisy has moved on and is married to Tom. To get her back, Jay threw huge parties just to get her attention. “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can” (Fitzgerald p. 116). Once he finally talked to Daisy, he was still in love, but the thing was that he was in love with the girl he dated five years past, he had not met the girl who is right is in front of him. Green is also a color of envy and Gatsby and Myrtle are the two characters who expresses the most jealously. Jay is jealous of Daisy’s relationship with Tom and he is jealous of the people who came to all his parties because they were old money whereas Jay was new money, meaning he had to earn it himself through bootlegging beer and being mentored from his best friend, Dan Cody, who taught Jay to live life, while also being friends with Meyer Wolfshein, known for rigging the 1919 World Series, helped Jay with his money. Myrtle is jealous of Daisy and Tom. Her affair with Tom has turned her into a mean person. Her with her poor husband, being the mistress of Tom makes her think that she is powerful because she rose from the dirt to a

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