The Importance Of Green Light In The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, a novel about a tragic lone affair. Although the novel can certainly be viewed as the story of one man, Gatsby, it is in truth about the struggles of himself and his personal goals. Fitzgerald uses the green light on Daisy Buchanan’s dock to illuminate the internal meaning aside from what it really physically is. The green light represents the wants and desires that people had in the 1920’s and still continue to have to this day.

In the first section of The Great Gatsby, chapters one through three, the reader is introduced to Jay Gatsby. In chapter one, Jay Gatsby is described by Nick Carraway, the narrator, as “…everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away” (Fitzgerald 2). This description of Gatsby merely explains through Nick that Gatsby is living in, or is attempting to live in, a wealthy and lavish lifestyle that many people in lower classes strive to achieve and fulfill. Since Gatsby does not originally come from the upper class, it seems to Nick that Gatsby is filled with fear, and that he is a sensitive person when it comes to dangerous situations, such as rejection. “…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 way, that might have been the end of a dock” (21). With this quote, the symbolization of the green light makes sens...

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... he had wanted all along.

The American dream of one going from the lower or middle class to the upper class is very difficult, if not impossible to accomplish. This is how it was for Gatsby. Although he came from a poor family, he was able to temporarily build his way up to the upper class by bootlegging. Gatsby had innocently fooled himself into thinking he belonged to a class much higher than what he was born into, simply because the woman he thought was the love of his life belonged to the upper class and he feared the thought of being rejected by her. The green light on Daisy’s dock clearly serves a greater purpose than just simply being a green light on a dock. It carries a much greater and in-depth meaning which everyone from the 1920’s and today can relate to, and that is being successful in life when it comes to money, relationships, and social rankings.