The Great Gatsby
Recurring Images
Color
Eyes or Vision
Wasteland
Sunlight / Shadows
Death
Time
Gold
Chapter 1
The front was broken by a line of French windows
, glowing now with reflected gold . . . .
Chapter 5
An hour later the front door opened nervously and Gatsby in a white flannel suit,
silver shirt and gold-colored tie hurried in.
His bedroom was the simplest room of all--except where the dresser was garnished
with a toliet set of pure dull gold.
Daisy admired this aspect or that of the feudal silhouette against the sky, admired
the gardens, the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of hawthorn and
plum blossoms and the pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate.
Chapter 6
“And if you want to take down any addresses here’s my little gold pencil . . . .”
White
Chapter 1
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on
which two women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon.
They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering .
“Our white girlhood was passed there. Our beautiful white -----”
Chapter 3
Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn . . . .
Chapter 4
She dressed all in white and had a little white roadster and all day
long the telephone rang in her house . . . .
Chapter 7
Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols,
weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the
fans.
High in a white palace the king’s daughter,
the golden girl . . .
DAISY
What color is a daisy?
Green
Chapter 1
Involuntarily I glanced seaward-- and distinguished nothing except a single green
light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock
Chapter 4
Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory
we started to town.
Chpater 5
Gatsby: “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”
Now it was again a green light on the dock
Chapter 7
In the sunlight his face was green.
Chapter 9
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year
recedes before us.
Other Colors
Lavender
bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender
a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery
of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender
Blue
. . . hope sprang into his light blue eyes (Wilson)
. . .a uniform of robin’s blue egg. . .
In his blue gardens . . . .
Pink
a pink and gold billow of foamy clouds above the sea
a pink glow from Daisy’s room
He [Gatsby] wears a pink suit.
The telling eyes
of the main characters
Chapter 1
Two shinning, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face . . . (Tom)
Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright
passionate mouth . . . (Daisy)
Her grey, sun strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of
a wan, charming discontented face. (Jordan)
Chapter 7
. . . Now I was looking at it again, through Daisy’s eyes. It is invariably saddening
to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own
powers of adjustment
Her frightened eyes told whatever intentions, whatever courage she had had, were
definitely gone.
Chapter 5
I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it
drew from her [Daisy’s] well-loved eyes.
The Eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg
Chapter 2
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 nonexistent nose.
Chapter 7
I turned my head as if I had been warned by something behind. Over the
ashheaps the giant eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg kept their vigil . . . .
Then as Doctor T.J. Eckleburg’s faded eyes came into sight down the road . . . .
Chapter 8
Standing behind him[George] Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at
the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg which had just emerged pale and enormous from
the dissolving night.
“God sees everything,” repeated Wilson.
Owl Eyes
Chapter 3
A stout middle-aged man with enormous owl eyed spectacles was sitting
somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady
concentration at the shelves of books.
“Absolutely real--have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice
durable cardboard. Matter of fact they’re absolutely real.”
“Don’t ask me,” said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of the whole matter.
Chapter 9
Owl eyes spoke to me at the gate.
“I couldn’t get to the house,” he remarked.
“Neither could anybody else.”
“Go on!” He started.”Why, my God! They used to go there by the hundreds.”
He took off his glasses and wiped them again outside and in.
“The poor son-of-a-bitch, he said.
Wasteland
The landscape
About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the
railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile so as to shrink away from a
certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes-- a fantastic farm where
ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes
take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke . . .
Then the valley of ashed opened out on both sides of us
The characters
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures
and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it
was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made
....
Gatsby
No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul
dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in
the abortive shadows and short-winded elations of men.
Sunlight and Shadows
For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon
her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I
listened-- then the glow faded, each light deserting her with
lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.
We slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine.
Over the great bridge, with sunlight through the girders making a
constant flicker upon the moving cars. . . .
Gatsby got himself into a shadow . . .
It occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind . . . .
When he realized what I was talking about, that there were twinklebells of sunshine in the room, he smiled like a weatherman . . . .
The room. shadowed well with awnings, was dark and cool.
Death
A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blossoms,
followed by two carriages with drawn blinds and by more
cheerful carriages for friends.
Myrtle’s body was wrapped in a blanket and then in another
blanket as though she suffered from a chill in the hot night lay
on a work table by the wall. . . .
The chauffeur--he was one of Wolfsheim’s proteges-- heard the
shots . . . .
It was after we started with gatsby toward the house that the
gardner saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the
holocaust was complete.
Chapter 1
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave
me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
Chapter 2
All I kept thinking over and over was “You can’t live forever”
(Myrtle)
Chapter 4
One October day in nineteen-seventeen--
Time
Chapter 5
Luckily the clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his head,
whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers and set it back in place.
He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with
his teeth set, so to speak,at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction,
he was running down like an overwound clock.
Chapter 6
“I wouldn’t ask too much of her, I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”
“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his
house, just out of reach of his hand.
The ending . . .
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any
lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the sound. And as the
moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until I gradually became
aware of the old island here that flowered once for the Dutch sailors’ eyes-- a fresh,
green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for
Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human
dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the
presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he never
understood or desired, face to face for the last time in history with something
commensurate to his capacity to wonder.
And as I stood there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of
Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of daisy’s dock. He
had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that
he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him,
somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the
republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year
recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter-- tomorrow we will run
faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . . And one fine morning--So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
The Great Gatsby
F.Scott Fitzgerald