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The colour of meaning in The Great Gatsby ARTICLE

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The colour of meaning in The Great Gatsby ARTICLE

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Describing The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald said that he had created 'something new - something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned'. Kevin Rea looks at how part of that pattern is created by the writer's use of colour

The 'intricate pattern' F. Scott Fitzgerald creates in his most celebrated novel, The Great Gatsby, relies primarily on an inspirational use of colour. In doing so Fitzgerald is a product of his time. Other novelists in the early part of the twentieth century, among them James Joyce in Dubliners, also use colour to evoke feelings about place and character in their writing. Brown, for example, recurs throughout Dubliners in an attempt to convey the spiritual stagnation and paralysis of the city, and ultimately of Joyce himself:

From the front window I saw my companions playing below in the street ... I looked over at the dark house where she lived. I may have stood there for an hour, seeing nothing but the brown-clad figure cast by my imagination.

As the writer who effectively created the celebrated 'Jazz Age spirit', however, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses colour in a more subtle, smooth and pervasive manner than Joyce. Colours' resonances in the novel depend, like the sounds of a jazz trumpet, upon the emotional context in which they are used, and no two uses of colour are ever exactly the same. They infuse the novel with a rich, poetic texture and allow Fitzgerald to help the reader feel Gatsby and Nick's experiences as well as see them. Colours communicate the moral, social and spiritual dimensions of the work as deeply as any of the other more obvious symbols in the novel.

Sunlight through the girders

Colour is most readily linked to the interconnected themes of aspiration and failure. Relaying Nick's optimism as he drives across the Queensboro bridge, Fitzgerald exults in yellow:

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps built with a wish out of nonolfactory money.

Yellow and white create a sense of richness and innocence. The city is being seen for the first time by someone whose hopes for wealth and spiritual transcendence remain uncorrupted by real-life experience.

Yellow appears again at Gatsby's party where uninvited guests mingle and aspire to meet their mysterious, all-powerful (and inordinately wealthy) host:

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher.

The sense of hope conveyed by yellow is still present in the light and music. But the fact that 'the earth lurches away from the sun' hints at the transient powers wealth bestows. But for now the party thrives on the dynamic energy conveyed by yellow and there is immense, if fleeting, energy and hope.

As Nick's drunkenness intensifies, he introduces an even more brilliant flourishing of yellow -- gold:

With Jordan's slender golden arm resting in mine, we descended the steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow.

Gold, used in the Old Testament as the colour of the coveted idolatrous calf, hints at the idea of idol worship. Jordan possesses wealth and occupies a coveted position due to her reputation as a golf pro. Fans worship her. Nick spies her at the party standing 'at the head of the marble steps, leaning a little backward and looking with contemptuous interest down into the garden'. Jordan is described as a type of ornamental golden statuette. When Nick pulls Jordan's 'golden' arm close, he hopes for the sanctity provided by wealth and reputation. The two girls in yellow towards whom Nick and Jordan gravitate represent an energetic, playful pairing who also seem to aspire to Jordan's position. Yellow is, however, a pale imitation and mimicry of gold's richness.

The party's blend of yellow (hope) and gold (money worship) is significant. It is this quintessentially American mixture which proves to be the undoing of both the protagonist and his nation.

The most tragic aspirations in the novel are those of Jay Gatsby himself. Fitzgerald uses several colours to convey this. Green seems the most striking colour employed: it carries religious overtones of cardinal sin (envy); sensations of potential fruitfulness or growth as the colour of spring; the obvious interpretation of jealousy; and, as the colour of the dollar, a sense of purely material richness.

Gatsby needs money in order for his quest for Daisy to have any hope of realistic achievement. It is therefore significant that she, the woman of his dreams, lives across the Sound beyond the 'green light at the end of the dock'. Fitzgerald complements this at the end of the novel by using the colour green in association with America's tragic desire to bind together its growth as a nation, its national destiny, with acquisitiveness. The Dutch settlers, like Gatsby with his green light, saw the 'green breast' and attempted to possess it.

Gatsby, then, is simply an incarnation of the American 'dream made flesh' by the Jazz Age and the pre-Wall Street crash optimism of the early 1920s. The fact that the green light 'year by year recedes before us' demonstrates that the American dream as a force is at once continually fresh and inspiring yet unfulfilling. It remains 'out there' somewhere -- and it leads us backwards morally because it is based essentially on economic lust. The American dream therefore is a type of devilish pact with mammon, a point emphasised when Gatsby takes Nick 'underground' to meet his accomplice and 'maker', Wolfsheim, a beastly caricature of a Jewish New Yorker whose traits are brutish and barbaric.

Finally, the vehicle by which hope meets its demise in the novel, Gatsby's car, combines the colour of bright optimism (the yellow exterior) with that of material success (green upholstery). Spiritual energy and money worship share the same imaginative space in this potent symbol of America's conflicted identity. The journey, we understand from the colours, naturally ends in collision and disaster; these two desires cannot possibly complement each other.

Inevitably, as Fitzgerald decides to highlight certain thematic subtleties he correspondingly alters his use of colour. Never too far away from the exuberance of yellow lie the scattered grey ash-heaps. According to Bruccoli (one of Fitzgerald's biographers) these are real places, located in the area of New York known as Flushing Meadow. Here, the suffering poor reside in a faded, hellish world reminiscent of Dante's Inferno. Thus grey suggests a corrupted; clouded moral vision and spiritual devastation.

The substitution of capitalist goggles for a clear moral vision occurs when Fitzgerald introduces the god-like omniscient stare of the oculist T.J. Eckleberg:

This is a valley of ashes -- a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges ... where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.

These grey men are the by-products of the American dream, the victims of bosses who commute through the area on the way to Wall Street.

Blue has overtones of unhappiness, 'feeling blue', and of aristocracy, 'blue blooded'. Both of these associations are used by Fitzgerald. For instance, Gatsby gazes across the blue Sound to an aristocratic love just out of reach. Overall, the colour is linked to airy, empty insubstantiality and, in the end, to tragic yearning. The sky towards which all New Yorkers look radiates blue. Gatsby's messenger delivers all the promise of his party to Nick in a uniform of 'robin's-egg blue'.

When Nick and Tom enter Wilson's garage, 'a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes'. Taking pleasure in Tom's appearance, Myrtle comes down dressed in blue. Yet she moves somewhat inelegantly, as if the dress does not quite fit:

Then I heard footsteps on a stairs, and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door ... Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.

Both she and Wilson aspire; Wilson towards masculine success and a shiny blue car, Myrtle towards the owner of the blue car and all the success his attire promises. But both are associated with blue, the colour most easily connected both to vitality and doomed, unrealistic aspirations.

The dimmed eyes of T.J. Eckleburg, arguably the most haunting and resilient symbol in the novel, 'are blue and gigantic' with 'yellow spectacles'. Promise and hopeless aspiration mingle. Ultimately these eyes are lifeless, visionless. They promise nothing and, significantly, see nothing. It may appear that the American dream delivers reputation, one's 'name in billboards', but sensitive readers with an understanding of the symbolic importance of colour sense otherwise. As Myrtle responds to the false promise of a hopeless vitality, she, George, and ultimately Gatsby find themselves taken for a ride with tragic consequences.

All of this points to a conscious artifice on the part of the writer. Fitzgerald wanted to create something new, precious and artistic in this novel. Tragically, it is not something he ever managed to recreate with such consummate skill. The Great Gatsby, therefore, is a 'great book' not simply because of the interest and complexity generated by its characters, plot and historical veracity. It is appealing because of its artistic brilliance, its satisfying unity. In a moment of sheer inspiration Fitzgerald has Daisy, during Nick's first visit at the height of summer when white candles are burning extravagantly, observe:

'I looked outdoors for a minute, and it's very romantic outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He's singing away.' Her voice sang: 'It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?'

The links suggested here between Daisy's emotional fragility, the precariousness of her marriage and moral vision and the 'White Star Line', the same line which put the Titanic to sea, are powerful.

Colour carries with it the potential for immense creativity and artistic resonance. Fitzgerald consciously shaped the narrative with his use of colour and, in doing so, left something precious as well as instructive.

Kevin Rea is Head of Sixth Form Seminar and teaches English and Drama at Tonbridge School in Kent.

Bruccoli, M. (1981) Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hodder & Stoughton.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1950) The Great Gatsby, Penguin. Joyce, J. (1914) Dubliners, Penguin.

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The colour of meaning in The Great Gatsby

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Describing The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald said that he had created 'something new - something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned'. Kevin Rea looks at how part of that pattern is created by the writer's use of colour The 'intricate pattern' F.

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Color and Cosmos in the Great Gatsby ARTICLE

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Color and Cosmos in the Great Gatsby ARTICLE

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ARTICLE

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Literature and Its Times: Profiles of 300 Notable Literary Works and the Historical Events that Influenced Them.​  ARTICLE

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Literature and Its Times: Profiles of 300 Notable Literary Works and the Historical Events that Influenced Them.​  ARTICLE

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