How Does Fitzgerald Use Color In The Great Gatsby

In the novel The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald emphasizes wealth and materialism; he focuses on the different ways money can change a person, how they show it off, and how different a person with money is from a person without it. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald uses the motifs of color and flowers to communicate that people like displaying their money; and in the novel money is displayed through colors and flowers.

Money is an important symbol in the novel, as it is structured around the idea of the American dream. So money is everywhere, in cars, houses, people, and in color—specifically, yellow. The color yellow is seen quite often in the novel, like in Gatsby’s car which is described as “[a] big yellow car”(Fitzgerald 139), or in two of Gatsby’s

They are represented in dark colors like gray and black throughout the book. At the beginning of chapter two, the setting is the Valley of Ashes which is described as “Grey land with spasms of bleak dust”(Fitzgerald 32) with “ [lines] of gray cars”(Fitzerald 32). The author’s intentional use of the color gray sets the tone for the readers to visualize the valley of ashes as some dark, and beggarly place. Fitzgerald also uses color to describe the people in the Valley of Ashes as “Ash-gray men”(Fitzgerald 23). He does this to highlight the clear difference between those who are wealthy which are represented with bright colors and those who are poor which are represented with dark colors. The dark colors highlight the desperation and hopelessness of their lives, “he was a blond, spiritless man” (Fitzgerald 25). This

Gatsby’s house is described as having “gardens, with the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of hawthorn and plum blossoms”(Fitzgerald 90). This big garden is a display of money but in the form of flowers, so when people see the flowers they immediately assume the person with the money to put on a display like this must be wealthy. In this novel, flowers are a display of money, so when Gatsby and Nick organized for tea with Daisy, Gatsby had flowers brought over to Nick’s home. “Flowers were unnecessary for at 2 o'clock a greenhouse arrived from Gatsby’s, with innumerable receptacles to contain it” (Fitzgerald 84). Daisy and Myrtle are also flowers that display wealth, but in the form of people. They both represent money, but in different ways. Daisy represents the rich, since she is wealthy. “Her voice is full of money”(Fitzgerald 120) is what Gatsby says about Daisy when talking about her with Nick. This shows how Fitzgerald created her to be some kind of symbol representing what wealth looked like for a woman in those times. Myrtle, on the other hand, wants to be rich and wants money, which is why she is so attracted to Tom. Myrtle and Daisy play important roles in the story both as symbols and characters, since they show two perspectives of the same thing,