Symbolism In The Great Gatsby

Debora Cotoc

Mr.Banks

ENG-4UI 02

April 13, 2023

The American Dream

Everyone has dreams of their desired future. The only thing they dream of is the only thing they do not have. The American dream is the hope for happiness, success, and money that someone has. For most people, the dream is based only upon living a greater and higher standard of life. In the catastrophic novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald created Gatsby as a character who became outstanding. He began his life as a lower-class, ordinary, citizen and had to work his way up to being wealthy without help from his family. He aimed for anything he could do to attempt to achieve his American dream to be with a girl who ditched him for a wealthier man because she wanted to

Gatsby says “ If it was not for the mist we could see your home across the bay,” said Gatsby. “ You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.” (Fitzgerald 92). To Gatsby the green light represents his dream, which is Daisy. To achieve this dream he would be attaining the American dream. It had appeared to Gatsby that he accomplished the dream of being with Daisy. However the green light showed the impracticality of reaching the American dream after Gatsby defeated his goal to claim Daisy. “Possibly it had occurred to him that the huge significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy- Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.” (Fitzgerald 93). In Casie E. Hermanson, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1997. It is said that “ In this book, she is the love interest of Jay Gatsby, who builds his mansion for her, and views her East Egg Home from the point of the green light”. The critic Casie E. Hermanson notes that the green light represents Jay Gatsby’s desires towards a victorious future and it is like Gatby is reaching out for the green light trying to reach for his desires and goals. Like so that green light showed the worthlessness of reaching the American dream

T. J. Eckleberg. “The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckelberg are blue and gigantic-their retinas are one yard high.”(Fitzgerald 26). Many may be fooled to think that the eyes are God’s eyes looking down and watching everything but the eyes are shown as an advertisement and how blind people can really be. In Charles Thomas Samuels, "The Greatness of 'Gatsby,'" in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. VII, No. 4, Autumn, 1966, pp. 783–94 “Over this world brood the blind eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg: the sign for an oculist's business which was never opened, the symbol of a blindness which can never be corrected. Like other objects in the book to which value might be attached, the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg are a cheat. They are not a sign of God, as Wilson thinks, but only an advertisement—like the false promise of Daisy's moneyed voice, or the green light on her dock, which is invisible in the mist.” What Charles Thomas Samuels is trying to say is that because the eyes were seen as a “God” characters were blinded in their love interests and things that they do daily, not paying attention to what is really in front of them. In the Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby can not see how Daisy is careless and shallow, Tom can not see how he is being a hypocrite after breaking Myrtle’s nose, and most importantly Dr. Eckleberg’s eyes and how Wilson sees the eyes as a sign of judgment and God’s