COLOUR
SYMBOLISM
IN
THE GREAT GATSBY
YELLOW (or Gold)
 Yellow typically represents new life & new beginnings
 It also represent cowardliness (“yellow belly”)
 Golden stands for
1) richness or royalty, but also
2) happy or prosperous: “golden days;” “golden age”
3) successful: “the golden girl of tennis”
4) extremely valuable: “a golden opportunity”
• At Gatsby's parties even the turkeys turn to gold:
"..turkeys bewitched to a dark gold" (41).
• Jordan Baker - the golden girl of golf - is also
associated with this colour: "With Jordan's slender
golden arm resting in mine" (44); "I put my arm around
Jordan's golden shoulder" (77).
YELLOW
Yellow in general means corruptness
and things that go bad.
Yellow leaves represent decay and
corruptness.
The yellow of Gatsby’s car represents
corrupt dishonesty and deception.
GOLD
• With a few sentences Fitzgerald throws a light at the
turbulent months while Daisy is waiting for Gatsby
during the war:
"All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless
comment of the ‘Beale Street Blues’ while a
hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled
the shining dust. At the grey tea hour ..." (144).
• Here even the dust in the rooms, usually grey, is
shining, while the usually golden tea is served at the
grey tea hour.
• We find this contrast between golden and grey once
more in "we went about opening the rest of the windows
downstairs, filling the house with grey-turning, goldturning light" (144).
Yellow & Gold
•
Sometimes the gold at Gatsby's house turns to yellow. Thus, the
richness is only a cover, a short sensation, like the yellow press
(journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched
news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more
newspapers) for the more offensively sensational press: "now the
orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music" (42).
•
In contrast to the golden girl Jordan, her admirers are only yellow:
 "two girls in twin yellow dresses“ (44)
 “’You don't know who we are,’ said one of the girls in yellow, ‘but
we met you here about a month ago” (44)
 "... we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow“ (44)
• Remarkably Daisy's daughter has old and yellow hair: "Did
mother get powder on your old yellowy hair?" (111).
GOLD
Gold represents wealth, but, more so,
the show of wealth. Gatsby tried to
win Daisy back by his parties and the
show of wealth.
WHITE
Gatsby has two important experiences
in his life before the story starts:
1) Dan Cody with his yacht: "that yacht
represented all the beauty and
glamour in the world” (96).
2) Daisy Fay. She wears white clothes
and has a white car.
WHITE
White stands for:
 innocence & purity
 morally unblemished
 honorable
"His heart beat faster as Daisy's white
face came up to his own" (107).
WHITE
In the novel, white is the color that
has the deeper meaning of false
purity or goodness.
Daisy and Jordan are always seen in
white.
Also, Gatsby, when he wanted to
meet Daisy again for the first time in
5 years, he wore a white suit as if to
show that he was good and pure.
WHITE
• About Daisy’s voice: “It was full of money – that was
the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it…High in
a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl"
(115).
• When Nick Carraway visits the Buchanans for the first
time he meets two young women, of course being Daisy
and Jordan: "They were both in white" (13).
• Even the windows at Daisy's house are white: "The
windows were ajar and gleaming white" (13).
• "Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our
beautiful white" (Daisy and Jordan, 24).
• “They came to a place where there were no trees and
the sidewalk was white with moonlight" (Daisy and
Gatsby, 106).
WHITE
• Fitzgerald uses the colour white for the real
West, although he doesn't even mention the
name of the color: "When we pulled out into
the winter night and the real snow, our
snow" (166).
• At the end of the novel ["the party was
over" (171), like the end of the Jazz Age at
the Great Depression in 1929], signified
when somebody soils Gatsby's house: "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"
(171).
GREEN
Green stands for:
 Experience
 Greed (money)
 Envy
 Jealousy
“You can’t always get what you want”
(The Rolling Stones)
GREEN
Fitzgerald used the colour green to signify "not faded", like in
"a green old age", or for hope (or for wanting what you can’t
have):
• "I glanced seaward – and distinguished nothing except a
single green light" (25). This green light is across the sea
where Buchanan's house is supposed to be.
• Gatsby said: "You always have a green light that burns all
night at the end of your dock" (90), which represents one’s
dreams (or unattainable dreams)
• "Now it was again a green light on a dock" (90)
• "...when he first picked out the green light at the end of
Daisy's dock" (171)
• Hope for the future: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the
orgastic future that year by year recedes before us" (171).
• Later the whole water between Gatsby and Daisy gets green:
"On the green Sound, stagnant in the heat,.."
GREEN
 Green represents so many things in this
novel. One main thing it means is something
to hope for, to reach out for, and a hope of
something new, like the green light that is at
the end of Daisy’s and Tom’s dock.
 In the first chapter Gatsby is reaching out
for the light. He is reaching out for his hope
of Daisy and a life with her.
 Green also represents wealth and prosperity.
And both of these meanings correlate with
each other because in the book, wealth is
something to hope for and to reach out for.
GREY
Grey is the color for dreariness.
It symbolizes the lack of life and/or
spirit.
It is the place of no hope, no future.
In the novel, this place is called the
“valley of ashes” where everything is
covered in grey dust - even the
people. This would not be a place
where you would want to be.
GREY
• Gatsby's ideal is grey and empty. WHY?
• The Wilsons, living in the valley of ashes,
appear in grey, except for Myrtle, when she
enjoys the company of Tom Buchanan.
• Wilson is "mingling immediately with the
cement color of the walls. A white ashen
dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as
it veiled everything in the vicinity – except
his wife, who moved close to Tom" (28).
• The only way for Myrtle to get out of the
grey seems to be Tom Buchanan. HOW?