“But above the grey 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” (Fitzgerald, 23). In this short segment from the beginning of the second chapter of The Great Gatsby, we can find some of the recurrent symbols of the book. Twenty-two times is the word “blue” used, to describe anything from Gatsby’s gardens to Mediterranean honey. In Gatsby, colors transcend from being just that, they are symbols. “Blue represents tranquility, melancholy, loneliness and fantasy [..]. The blue color, which is full of sadness and fantasy, indicates Gatsby’s real inner self - lonely, sorrowful and fanciful. (Zhang, 6). In …show more content…
Blue represents sadness and green means hope. But there are also East Egg and West Egg, which represent the old and new money, respectively, and the aforementioned eyes of T.J. Eckleburg, a symbol for god, and for society’s lack of morals. And how does all of this relate to Picasso? Well, as Robert Hughes explains in his article The artist Pablo Picasso, “The so-called Blue and Rose periods [...] are not, despite their great popularity, much more than pendants to late 19th century Symbolism”. Does The Great Gatsby belong to the Symbolist movement as well? This is difficult to say, because “of all modern art movements, Symbolism remains the most difficult to pin down” (Morris). It is hard to pinpoint exactly what characterizes a work as “symbolist”, but Mallarme’s manifesto is probably as close as it gets: "To depict not the thing but the effect it produces” (qtd. in Morris). Fitzgerald fulfills this basic in many occasions, for example when describing the activity at the party at Gatsby’s as “ In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars” (Fitzgerald, 39). The gardens are not blue obviously, but we get the feeling of loneliness and solitude of Gatsby despite all of the