Color and Cosmos in "The Great Gatsby"
Author(s): A. E. Elmore
Source: The Sewanee Review , Summer, 1970, Vol. 78, No. 3 (Summer, 1970), pp. 427-443
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27541823
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COLOR AND COSMOS
IN THE GREAT GATSBY
By A. E. ELMORE
CfHEsuccess,
GREAT
GATSBY is constantly hailed as a technical
but thereby often subtly condemned. "Techni
cally," Henry Dan Piper has written, uThe Great Gats
by was the most carefully planned and most flawlessly executed of
all Fitzgerald's novels. . . ." Yet Piper argues that Tender Is
the Night was "artistically" an advance upon the earlier novel.
Similarly Arthur Mizener praises Fitzgerald for committing him
self in Gatsby to a "workable form which he never betrayed",
while he reserves much higher praise?"Fitzgerald's finest and
most serious novel"?for Tender Is the Night. Perhaps the
notion that Gatsby, for all its technical virtues, is somehow lacking
in seriousness and range of meaning is partly attributable to Fitz
gerald himself, who in defending Tender Is the Night called it
a "philosophical" or "psychological" novel having different
canons from a "dramatic" novel like Gatsby.
Tender Is the Night is of course a fine, if frequently flawed,
novel. But The Great Gatsby is nothing less than one of the very
great achievements of American literature. The technical achieve
ment of Gatsby is part and parcel of a total artistic achieve
ment embodying the seriousness, catholicity, and depth one ex
pects of a great work. "I want to write something new?some
thing extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately
patterned," Fitzgerald wrote to a friend as he was planning the
novel. The burden of this essay is to demonstrate the manner
and degree of his success.
The novel is built around three major settings which are de
picted primarily in terms of light and color imagery and a fourth
which, though somewhat less precise in its outlines and imagery, is
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428
THE GREAT GATSBY
of equal importance. The settings are, in order of appearanc
East Egg, the valley of ashes, West Egg, and downtown Ne
York. Chapter I is devoted primarily to East Egg, even thou
other settings figure briefly. Chapter II focuses on the valley o
ashes, even though part of the action is set in Manhattan. Ch
ter III defines West Egg, though it too shifts to the city. Ch
ter IV presents downtown New York as a setting in its own righ
As the imagery becomes more and more patterned, resonant, an
suggestive, these settings take on a symbolic character which e
bodies a theme more serious and universal than has, I believ
been previously acknowledged.
In Chapter I the narrator, Nick Carraway, introduces th
"white palaces of fashionable East Egg", particularly the pe
vasively white mansion of the Buchanans, who dress in white a
talk endlessly about the white race. "The idea is if we don
look out the white race will be?will be utterly submerged," Tom
Buchanan tells Nick, not once but many times and in vario
forms. Daisy Buchanan mocks Tom's ideas, but in terms of s
and clothes she is even more conspicuously white than her h
band. She and her alter ego, Jordan Baker, are <cboth in whi
on Nick's first visit, and on his only other recorded visit to Ea
Egg the girls are again wearing "white dresses". On the lat
occasion Nick compares them to "silver idols". Still later, h
speaks of Daisy as "gleaming like silver" when he is recalling th
impression she made as a young lady in Louisville on Lieutenan
Jay Gatsby, who saw her "white face [come] up to his own
when he first made love to her. During those Louisville yea
as described by Jordan Baker, Daisy "dressed in white, and
a little white roadster".
White, even after one excludes near-synonyms such as silve
makes more appearances in the novel than any other single colo
and something like three of every four are applied to East E
or characters from East Egg, especially to Daisy. Even the
parent exceptions sometimes contribute to the pattern. For
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A. E. ELMORE
429
ample, Nick wears "white flannels" to the first party
at Gatsby's. Although he lives on West Egg, Nick i
of Daisy's and much closer to her social milieu than to
Indeed, at the very beginning of the novel, Nick st
that Gatsby "represented everything for which I
affected scorn". To take another example, Gatsby, who
ary caramel-colored or pink suits virtually define
wears on one occasion a "white flannel suit". The occ
long-awaited reunion with Daisy.
Although Nick's first visit with the Buchanans ex
into the evening, there is throughout the visit an e
light. When he arrives, the windows are "glowing
reflected gold" of the sun. Jordan's eyes are "sunThe porch is "open toward the sunlight", and candle
the table. Nick sees Daisy "winking ferociously tow
vent sun". "For a moment," he says slightly later of D
last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon h
face. . . ." Still later, the candles are re-lit. Even in
crimson room bloomed with light." At the end of N
the Buchanans stand "side by side in a cheerful square
Driving home, Nick frames the gas-pumps he passe
of light", and he describes the night itself as "bright"
The word "bright" serves to connect light itself w
vasive whiteness we have observed. Again, the word
most frequently to Daisy. "Her face was sad and lo
bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate
Well over a third of the total appearances of "brig
novel occur in Chapter I alone, although the novel in
chapters which, except for the very long Chapt
roughly similar in length. The remaining appearanc
a description of Daisy's smile when she reunites with
Daisy's windows on the night of Gatsby's vigil afte
mobile accident, and, in a flashback, of Daisy's por
ville.
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430
THE GREAT GATSBY
The Buchanans represent the rich, old-family wing of whi
Anglo-Saxon, Protestant America in the era immediately fol
ing World War I. Daisy represents one of its enduringly f
miliar faces?Southern gentility ("Our white girlhood. . . . O
beautiful white [girlhood]," as she calls it)?while Tom repr
sents another?enormous wealth gleaned from "the dark fie
of the republic" and refined by Eastern education. Daisy is t
former Daisy Fay of Louisville, forever gleaming, forev
bright. Tom is "Tom Buchanan of Chicago", which is to
Lake Forest, who has gone to Yale and, after many wand
ings, settled in the East. He is a true Nordic up to his hair?
sturdy straw-haired man". Evidently he is Protestant.
have Nick's word in Chapter II that Daisy is not a Cathol
in a context which suggests that neither is Tom. There is lit
doubt about Tom's national origin. Buchanan is an old Scotti
name,1 conspicuously associated with American history beca
of Franklin Buchanan, first Superintendent of the Naval A
emy and later a Confederate naval officer, and because of Pr
dent James Buchanan. "Fay" is not so obviously British, but on
meaning of the word is "a white person".
The whiteness of East Egg, however, may suggest more th
a social class. In both the Neoplatonic and Judeo-Christian t
ditions, white (which is to say unbroken light) is symbolic of t
One, or of God, or of His abode. Shelley, who was in F
gerald's own words "a God to me once", adopted the Neoplato
color symbolism in A don?is when he figured the created worl
(life) as a "dome of many-coloured glass" and the milieu of
One (eternity) as "white radiance". In Revelation, heaven
persistently described as white. As Gatsby stares across th
courtesy bay at East Egg near the end of Chapter I, Nick sa
that he has "come out to determine what share was his of o
local heavens". In terms of imagery, the local heaven is clear
East Egg.
1Strictly speaking, then, not Anglo-Saxon, but within the province of that term
as it is applied to any American, particularly a Protestant, of British descent.
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A. E. ELMORE
431
Note that in addition to light and whiteness, air characterizes
this setting. Nick enters East Egg on a "windy evening". Even
inside the Buchanans' house, the wind is playing.
A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one
end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up
toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then
rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it
as wind does on the sea.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an
enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed
up as though upon an anchored balloon. 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. I must have stood for a few moments listening
to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a pic
ture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan
shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about
the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young
women ballooned slowly to the floor.
This passage represents more than mere physical description.
There is no reason inherent in the physical setting for Nick to
fancy that the girls "had just been blown back in after a short
flight around the house". Nick clearly means to suggest certain
intangible qualities, and throughout the remainder of the chapter
he employs images of air, suspension, and flight, often metaphori
cally. Jordan sits as if "balancing something" upon her chin.
Nick observes that her lips "fluttered". He uses an extended
metaphor of flight: "The murmur trembled on the verge of
coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased al
together." There are unobtrusive metaphors in such statements
as "The telephone rang inside, . . . and ... all subjects vanished
into air." What is suggested is a non-terrestrial, suspended world
3
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432
THE GREAT GATSBY
whose inhabitants float or fly or sit "completely motionless
if "buoyed up" on air.
By contrast, the valley of ashes presented in Chapter II
dusty, obscure, and, above all, gray.
About half way between West Egg and New York th
motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it
a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain d
late area of land. This is a valley of ashes?a fantas
farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills an
grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of hou
and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a tr
scendent effort, of men who move dimly and already cru
bling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of g
cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastl
creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray m
swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetra
cloud, which screens their obscure operations from yo
sight.
But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust
which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment,
the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T.
J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic?their retinas are one
yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a
pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non
existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set
them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens,
and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot
them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by
many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the
solemn dumping ground.
Dr. Eckleburg's eyes are blue and his spectacles are yellow, but
they have been "dimmed a little by many paintless days under
sun and rain", and the oculist who set them up perhaps "sank
down himself into eternal blindness". What is not explicitly
gray in the valley of ashes is, to use Nick's own words, "im
penetrable", "obscure", "dimmed", "dim", "dismal", "bare",
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A. E. ELMORE
433
"dust-covered", "shadow [y]", "faded", "ashen", "vei
"pale", "blurred", "hazy", "darkening", "blind", "blac
otherwise drab in color. Except for a sprinkling of Buc
white which we shall consider later, the colors in this chapte
to range from dull to dark. Myrtle Wilson is first seen we
a blue dress, but even it is "spotted" and the blue is "dark
she later changes into another of "brown figured muslin".
a "gray old man" she buys a dog with a "brown washra
back". She selects a "lavender-colored" taxicab, but Nick
not fail to note that it has "gray upholstery". Neither color
light lingers.
Then I heard footsteps on a stairs, and in a moment
thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from
office door.
... we slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing
sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the
window. . . .
. . . everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it,
although until after eight o'clock the apartment was full of
cheerful sun.
An overwhelming number of the references in the novel to gray,
to other dark colors, and to darkness and dimness themselves are
applied to the valley of ashes and its inhabitants.
Fitzgerald's valley of ashes has been frequently compared to
Eliot's waste land, but the differences are more instructive than
the similarities. Eliot's waste land is not, in terms of its imagery
and mythology, specifically Christian. Fitzgerald's valley of
ashes is. The eyes of an oculist wearing enormous spectacles
"brood on over the solemn dumping ground". The Greek word
Gehenna?"hell" in most English versions of the New Testa
ment?was derived from the Valley of Hinnom, a constantly
burning garbage-dump south and west of Jerusalem. In Dante
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434
THE GREAT GATSBY
and Milton, among others, hell is a place of obscurity and
ness?"darkness visible". Fitzgerald changed George B.
son's hair color from "yellow" to "pale", obviously to make it
better with his surroundings. Fitzgerald's gray inhabitant
the valley are ghostly people, ash-gray men with leaden spad
Myrtle Wilson walks through her husband "as if he w
ghost". Later in the novel the murderous Wilson appears,
like, as an "ashen, fantastic figure gliding . . . through the a
phous trees". The ash-gray men work beside a line of gray
which "crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly cr
reminiscent perhaps of Hawthorne's "Celestial Railroad
nally, "the valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small
river," after the manner of Dante's Inferno.
If East Egg is characterized by pure white light and the va
of ashes by the absence of light, West Egg is characterize
pecially in Chapter III, by the broken light of the prism or
bow?the "many-coloured glass" of A don?is or the "va
light" of Marvell's "Garden". This "many-colored" settin
Nick himself describes it in a later chapter, encloses "en
colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enorm
garden". The "halls and salons and verandas are gaudy
primary colors." Among these primary colors, yellow (oft
the form of gold) is at once the most conspicuous and the m
pervasive.
Gatsby's station wagon "scampered like a brisk yellow bu
meet all trains". "Every Friday five crates of orange
lemons arrived. . . ." Pastry pigs and turkeys are "bewit
to a dark gold". The bar has "a real brass rail". The orch
plays "yellow cocktail music". Two girls wear "twin y
dresses", and Nick associates this color with them no fewer t
five times before the chapter is out. Jordan's arm is "gold
A man wearing "enormous owl-eyed spectacles"?afterw
known simply as Owl-Eyes?inspects Gatsby's library.
motif of West Egg yellow recurs in subsequent chapters.
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A. E. ELMORE
435
by's Rolls-Royce, the "death car" which strikes down M
Wilson, proves to be yellow. Gatsby wears a "gold-color
for his reunion with Daisy. Even the toilet set which Da
spects on that occasion is of "pure dull gold". Much later
his reunion with Daisy has proved to be incommensurat
Gatsby's great vision, Gatsby walks disconsolately among
rinds", the remainders of the oranges and lemons of Chapt
In a flashback centered on his lonely return to Louisville
Daisy's marriage, Gatsby watches a "yellow trolley" racin
day-coach and wonders if the people in it might "once have
the pale magic of her face along the casual street". Indee
association of yellow or gold with Gatsby begins even befor
novel does. On the title page appears a little four-lin
which Fitzgerald attributed to Thomas Parke d'Invill
character in his first novel, This Side of Paradise:
Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!"
Only a few months before publication Fitzgerald consid
naming the novel Gold-Hatted Gatsby. Our final view o
living Gatsby in Chapter VIII is under "yellowing trees".
Yellow makes more appearances than any other single
except white, and both yellow and gold are applie
dominantly to West Egg and in particular to Gatsby. (Note
the Egg-islands both appear in egg colors?East Egg in w
and West Egg in yellow.) West Egg yellow is the co
precious metal, of harvest, of the sun, of callow youth ; it
short, the color of this created universe. Gatsby's "glo
garden" (the word "garden" appears again and again in
descriptions of Gatsby's estate) represents a version of
It is a world which is still close to the water from which i
only recently been separated, a world of sandy beaches
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436
THE GREAT GATSBY
hydroplanes and swimming pools. (The interested reader
discover that once again Nick's diction, especially his metapho
reflects a preoccupation with the distinguishing element,
time water?the moon is "floating in the Sound" and tremb
to the "drip" of the banjoes, and "a sudden emptiness seemed
flow now from the windows. . . .") As R. W. B. Lewis has
served, Gatsby is an Adamic figure. Even after his initiat
even after West Egg has lost its innocence because of the corr
ing influence of Daisy-Eve, the setting remains a symbol of t
pendant world, now shockingly fallen. Gatsby's final vision
dramatic reconstruction of what Adam might have felt a
looked up after tasting the forbidden fruit. "He must ha
looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves
shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and
raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A
world, material without being real. . . ." Gatsby receives
baptism of fire in his swimming pool, dying in the wate
Myrtle had died in the dust.
The final setting of the novel, downtown New York, comes
to its own in Chapter IV, though it has appeared earlier as a s
of extension of other settings, as in Chapter II. Downtown
York is a chameleon-like place, taking its color from those
enter it. Thus in Chapter II Myrtle selects a taxicab with g
upholstery and buys a dull-colored dog from a gray old m
Tom duplicates his world by putting her up at "one slice in a
white cake of apartment-houses". In Chapter IV, when Gat
takes Nick downtown, Nick sees "skins of tigers flaming" in
young Gatsby's fictional palace on the Grand Canal. In addi
he sees a "piece of metal, slung on a ribbon", which is Gats
reward for valor from little Montenegro, the "sunlight throu
the girders" as the two men cross the Queensboro Bridge,
the "yolks of . . . eyeballs" which belong to three Negroes
pass them as they cross Blackwell's Island. With no single
tinguishing color of its own, the downtown setting reveal
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A. E. ELMORE
437
character largely through imagery drawn from fire or it
festation, heat. (Air, earth, and water have distinguis
spectively, the three previous settings.) In Chapter IV
sits with Gatsby and Meyer Wolfsheim in a restaurant dur
hottest part of the day?"roaring noon". In Chapter VI
climax of the novel, Nick travels from the city to East
the "warmest" day of the year, and he returns with the ot
the city while Daisy and Jordan bemoan the unbearabl
Like the fire of purgatory, the heat of the city is purifyin
rating the dross from the true metal. It reveals Daisy
weak, vacuous person she is during the confrontation in t
suite between Gatsby and Tom, but it brings out the real st
integrity, and sacrificial devotion of Gatsby, who even af
ing lost Daisy keeps vigil outside her window and prote
from the consequences of the manslaughter she has comm
though it leads to his own death.
Gatsby (whose name suggests "gat", which was gang
gon for "gun" in the 'twenties) represents on one level th
lower orders which so threatened Tom Buchanan and
society in general. (The blond, blue-eyed George B.
with an obviously British name which, like Buchanan, h
its way into the White House?is another representative
lower orders, but he never threatens because he can never
He knows and keeps his place, even if it is in hell.) Ga
a German immigrant's son who has risen to wealth throug
underworld. He is, to Tom, "Mr. Nobody from Nowhe
Gatsby can win away Daisy, Tom can only feel confirmed
worst fears of a cultural Armageddon. Today German
grants; tomorrow Negroes.
Yet Gatsby represents much more. From his r?le a
in the garden, he moves toward the grander r?le of th
Adam, Jesus. He is forever stretching out his arms und
local heavens", or standing under a "wafer of a moon
"figure of the host", with "his hand up in a formal ges
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438 THE GREAT GATSBY
farewell". "He was a son of God?a phrase which, if
anything, means just that?and he must be about H
business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious
he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a sevente
boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he
ful to the end." Gatsby is thus a sacrificial but not a tra
His death stems not from hubris but from devotion to
is nothing less to Gatsby than the Platonic ideal for w
created "his Platonic conception of himself". Still, G
have a flaw, and it leads at least indirectly to his fa
his vision to an inferior object?"he had committed
the following of a grail"?and like Lancelot he is th
rupted and deterred from searching for the true Grai
of God allies himself to a mortal and, "betrayed", loses
which made him divine. Or, in another image, the Plat
forsakes the ladder of love, which would lead him to so
mystical union or fulfillment, for the physical wom
the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the
really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret plac
trees?he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and onc
could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incompara
wonder." Afterward, having forfeited his right to c
he knew that "his mind would never romp again like t
God."
The fact that Daisy is a "mixed" character illustrat
novel can be at once "simple" and "intricately patter
is associated with white clothes, white cars, white hous
white race, but she is also "the golden girl" with "yello
Her name reflects this mixture of colors: the daisy usu
white rays around a yellow disk. All of this is appro
she is torn between Tom and Gatsby. Still another colo
ated intimately with Daisy?the green of her dock ligh
Gatsby stared so many nights before his reunion with
makes relatively few appearances in the novel, and we
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A. E. ELMORE
439
overlook its appearance as the color of Gatsby's seat in one
two yellow cars. In the climactic Chapter VII, Gatsby a
argue over who will drive what car.
cShall we all go in my car?' suggested Gatsby. He
the hot, green leather of the seat. 'I ought to have
in the shade.'
'Is it standard shift?' demanded Tom.
<Yes.'
'Well, you take my coup? and let me drive your car to
town.'
The suggestion was distasteful to Gatsby.
What the men are really struggling over is Daisy?an example of
transference which is made more obvious and concrete by the
green leather which Gatsby touches. Daisy is "mixed" in still
another sense. She is the mortal who receives incarnation from
Gatsby, the son of God, under the Louisville trees. She is also
Fay?fairy, herself seeming to partake of the supernatural, the
divinely immortal.
What can we make of these hells and heavens, devils and gods?
They are, in the first place, the remnants of the novel with "a
catholic element" of which Fitzgerald spoke as he was planning
Gatsby and of which his short story "Absolution" was to have
been a part. But they are not merely vestigial ; the very theme
of the work inheres in them. East Egg is presented as heaven
because Nick is being true to Gatsby's original vision of it as the
goal of his son-of-God visions. The valley of ashes, where the
enormous, brooding eyes of Eckleburg parody those of the crea
tive spirit of God which "dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast
Abyss/And mad'st it pregnant . . ." in Paradise Lost} is literally
a place where God is absent except as "an advertisement". The
description is that of the Greek boy Michaelis, as he comforts the
bereaved George B. Wilson after Myrtle's death?Michaelis,
from Michael, the prophetic angel. Gatsby's world, West Egg,
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440
THE GREAT GATSBY
begins as uncorrupted Eden and evolves into the fallen, mo
world?the West of the setting sun. The purgatory of the f
inner city is a place of confrontation and suffering, but also?
like the valley of ashes?a place from which escape is possib
"Human sympathy has its limits, and we were content to let a
their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind."
course all of this is nothing if not ironic. East Egg is heave
only in Gatsby^s pristine vision of Daisy Fay Buchanan. T
inhabitants of the valley of ashes are never diabolical in the w
that, say, Tom Buchanan is. Purgatory is set squarely in
world's most glamorous city, the city which "seen from t
Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in
first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in
world". The world itself?West Egg?moves, as we have se
from Edenic innocence to the odor of postlapsarian mortali
only at the end to move again and assume the very qualities wh
earlier had been associated with the "heaven" of East Egg.
The ironic use of color imagery and symbolism can perha
best be illustrated by Fitzgerald's use of white. The heave
whiteness of East Egg begins as a symbol of beauty, goodn
and truth as Nick attempts to be faithful to Gatsby's vision
Daisy's world. However, after Nick has gauged how utterly
godly?indeed inhuman?the Buchanans really are, their wh
ness (which even from the beginning has undertones of evil a
Tom's racial ideas) takes on an ugly and markedly evil characte
Nick's final meeting with them?or rather with Tom, since Dai
never reappears after Gatsby's death?is a brilliant account of
nature of one kind of evil. Nick defines it?almost charitably,
might say?as "vast carelessness". Whatever its proper name
is symbolized by "a pearl necklace?or perhaps only a pair
cuff buttons" which Tom goes into a jewelry store to buy.
pearl of great price has been cast before swine, and the pearl it
has come to seem swine-like. The cuff buttons recall the horr
of the corrupt Wolfsheim's cuff links, made from human mola
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A. E. ELMORE
441
Whiteness allied with evil seems peculiarly appalling, as Ish
mael saw when he reflected on the whiteness of Moby Dick.
After speaking of such "whites" as those in the vision of St.
John in Revelation, Ishmael observes, "yet for all these accumu
lated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and
sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost
idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than
that redness which affrights in blood." Ishmael proceeds to
describe the worst form of this "panic" or terror: "This elusive
quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when di
vorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any ob
ject terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest
bounds." Surely by the end of The Great Gatsby Tom Bu
chanan, who is guilty of nothing less than a form of premeditated
murder and who nonetheless can say, "That fellow had it coming
to him," even as he invites Nick to pity him because of his mis
tress's death ("And if you think I didn't have my share of suffer
ing?look here, when I went to give up that flat and saw that
damn box of dog biscuits sitting there on the sideboard, I sat
down and cried like a baby"), must seem to any reader with
moral sanity an "object terrible in itself". The straw-haired
man has a headpiece filled with straw and a heart whose darkness
is now fully visible. In the background the white, white Daisy?
for whom the pearl necklace is presumably intended?also seems
a "grotesque thing", like all the "scarcely created world" in
Gatsby's final vision.
Yet Fitzgerald's technique does not end with ironic inversion.
Before the end of the novel, white regains its traditional symbolic
value as it is applied, at last, to Gatsby. On his last night in the
East, Nick revisits Gatsby's "huge incoherent failure of a house".
There he commits the most significant symbolic act in the
novel. "On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some
boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and
I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone." With
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442
THE GREAT GATSBY
this act Nick almost literally wipes Gatsby's slate clean. Gatsby
emergent whiteness is left intact. It is the only whiteness whi
is. Thus, though Gatsby has, like Adam, lost his Eden, his Ev
and his very life at least partly as the result of a single mistak
moral choice?to pursue an inferior object of adoration?he h
in Nick's eyes gained, with his sacrificial death, all of the heave
qualities implied by whiteness. It is only an extension of F
gerald's own imagery to say that Gatsby is "saved". He is n
saved from a literal hell to go to a literal heaven, any mor
than Goethe's Faust is. But the essential purity of his "religion
of romantic idealism is confirmed by Nick's act.
Surely one misses the meaning of this act?and of the symbol
imagery generally?when one assumes, as Piper does, that Gatsb
is "irretrievably damned" and that the romantic idealism
embodies is likewise condemned. The Great Gatsby is not,
Piper believes, a tragedy, because its protagonist is not finall
tragic hero. As Nick says in the opening chapter, "Gatsby turn
out all right at the end." Gatsby has, perhaps, sufficient gr
ness for a tragic hero, and he has a flaw which prepares him f
a fall. But the fall is directly the result, not of his flaw, but o
Tom Buchanan's. Tom informs George B. Wilson of t
identity of the death-car's owner, knowing, one must suppo
that Gatsby's death will be the almost certain consequence. Gatsb
does everything possible to protect Myrtle's real killer, Dais
and finally gives his life as part of the effort.
Furthermore, our final perspective on the events of the nove
is not Gatsby's but Nick Carraway's. (Carraway's very nam
can suggest not only the carelessness he shared at first with th
Buchanans?"care-away"?but also his ultimate ability to carr
away the lesson of Gatsby's life as he returns to the West a
reconstructs the story.) Nick's perspective takes the form
what we might call, in contradistinction to the "dying fall" Fit
gerald used at the end of Tender Is the Nighty the "living rise
I am referring to the sense of promise and renewal implied
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A. E. ELMORE
443
Nick's final vision of the Dutch sailors viewing the "fresh,
breast of the new world". Nick revives the terrible vi
Gatsby's last moments, of "a new world, material witho
real", but in a context which, despite Nick's explicit fatali
gests hope and rebirth. Note that at last green is here app
living, growing things, instead of to dock lights and auto
seats. Thus the novel is finally a vindication of romantic i
and not, as Piper claims, a criticism of it. It does not repr
as Piper also claims, "a retreat toward . . . the bosom of M
Church". It is true that Fitzgerald started out to write
with a catholic element, but he ended by adopting the i
and framework of his native Catholic Christianity to delin
essentially romantic and hence secular world-view. Alt
in an age of unbelief and vast carelessness, the romantic i
like Gatsby is almost certain to be defeated before he reac
particular goal, there remains the enduring consolation
seding tragedy and perhaps making it impossible, that th
ary pilgrim who is faithful to the end will find the journe
sufficient victory. The Great Gatsby endures as a monum
only to that notion but also to Fitzgerald's underrated pow
build a universal theme from a brilliantly effective te
structure.
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