Light Imagery In The Great Gatsby

In The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Daisy is often described with an overwhelming amount of light imagery. The reason for this is to set up the idea that she represents the sun in the center of Gatsby’s dreamed up universe. As the novel transitions from the end of spring to the beginning of autumn, the Sun moves further away from Earth. As the seasons advances from one to the next, Gatsby’s idea of Daisy progressively falls apart. With the use of nature imagery, seasonal changes are used in the novel to parallel Gatsby’s collapsing idea of Daisy by showing how his understanding of her grows increasingly different as the story progresses. As soon as she enters the novel, Daisy’s unique connection to the sun is established. In the first

The season of spring is reflective of the hope Gatsby has to continue a relationship with Daisy. It also coincides with his exquisite conception of Daisy, and how he first begins to perceive her. With spring, there is some flower-like imagery used to describe her as a beautiful, developing idea for Gatsby. When Nick is at the Buchanan’s house, he interprets the room that Daisy walks into as, “blooming with light” (17). And later, he expresses her as “opening up again in a flower-like way” (19). The phrases are used to depict how Gatsby first thought of Daisy as a beautiful idea. When Nick describes the time Gatsby and Daisy kiss, he writes, “At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete” (110). Although Nick writes that towards the middle of summer, the fact that he continued to describe Daisy as a flower reinforces the idea that Gatsby still believed she was something that she simply was not. But when he talks about the incarnation being complete, Nick means that the second the two of them kissed, all of the imaginative, fantasy ideas Gatsby had of Daisy were washed away by the reality of the woman he had pursued for five years. Until late summer, Gatsby still continued to believe the beautiful yet unrealistic invention of an idea that he imagined her to