What Does the Weather and Colours Symbolize in ‘The Great Gatsby’
In his famous novel ‘The Great Gatsby’, F. Scott Fitzgerald used various literary devices to present the main themes of the work and the personalities of his characters. In my essay, I want to find out what the weather and colors in the novel symbolize.
First of all, in ‘The Great Gatsby’, Fitzgerald uses colors mainly to represent status and class. Through the motif of colors, it depicts the emotions and relationships that each character has as a result of the class that they are in. Colors represent the desire to be indifferent to classes, as well as how people give off false impressions of being in a particular class. Fitzgerald assigns a specific color to each of the main characters to express their status. At the beginning of the novel, Nick goes to visit some of his friends. As he arrived, he was astonished by the colossal house. He describes the house as “…even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bat…” (9). Tom Buchanan owns the ‘Georgian Colonial mansion’. He embodies the colors ‘red and white’. Red represents the aristocracy or powerful ruling class and intense emotions, their characteristics fit Tom’s character perfectly. White is most known as innocent and feminine, but it can also mean selfish, careless, and destructive. This is ironic because, at the end of the novel, the rich people do not get any punishment for the wrongdoing of causing three innocent people to get killed. At the beginning of the third chapter, Nick goes over to Gatsby’s house. While he enters the glorious gates, he notices: “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars…A chauffeur in a uniform of robin’s-egg blue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning” (39). Gatsby is constantly surrounded by blue, representing fantasy and new money. Gatsby embodies the color blue but constantly strives to be more like Tom, who embodies the color red. The color blue represents a fantasy of what the aristocracy is like. Red is the true aristocracy. Since Gatsby is not part of the aristocracy and does not embody the color red, he stands out whenever he encounters it. Thus, Fitzgerald uses colors to represent the characters’ status and class. Even though color can mean anything different between each of us, weather can also have a symbiotic meaning.
In the novel, the weather can symbolize the human emotions of the characters during each situation. The weather has much to do with setting the mood for each event. During Daisy’s visit to Gatsby’s house, the lookout in the bay and Gatsby said: “If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay…You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock” (92). The quote illustrates the barrier to the reunion of Gatsby and Daisy. “If it wasn’t for the mist” displays the barrier and the distance that has fallen between Daisy and Gatsby. The mist can also represent materialism and the new family of Daisy, causing the two love birds unable to reunite. Daisy and Gatsby later were looking at his clipbook pictures of Daisy. They stood side by side examining it, but then the phone rang and Gatsby took up the receiver, after a while it rang off and Daisy suddenly cried: “The rain was still falling, but the darkness had parted in the west, and there was a pink and golden billow of foaming clouds above the sea” (94). The quote illustrates hints about the future of the characters in the novel. “The rain was still falling” foreshadows the upcoming, distant trouble for the characters. And “The darkness had parted in the west” represents that only for a short period of time will things be going fine in the story, then rain will soon fall again. Thus, as we can see, the weather in the novel symbolizes the emotions of the characters.
Summarizing all of the above, F. Scott Fitzgerald in his ‘The Great Gatsby’ successfully used the symbolism of color and weather to describe the characters’ status and foreshadow.