The Color Blue In The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald

Many stories cover sadness and its association with the color blue. When the color is just written off as sadness, a single emotion, it takes away from the opportunity to expand that idea further to the journey of struggles and how those emotions change over time. However, the further’s this idea is covered in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, using the color blue to represent it. His novel explores a story of hope and losing it through the narrator Nick and his perception of the east as an outsider. The reader learns about Gatsby’s whole life around Nick’s cousin Daisy and getting her back, despite the fact that she had already moved on and married her husband Tom Bucanon. Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby uses the color blue to convey a story of hope, rejecting reality, and inevitably losing that initial hope.

This can be seen throughout the story but one of the best examples would be when Nick goes to the garage with Tom and meets the character George Wilson. When Wilson sees Tom, he is hoping that Tom was there to finally sell him a car. The quote captures this moment perfectly, “When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his blue eyes,”(Fitzgerald ). This idea again shows up later when Nick’s interest and desire to know more about Gatsby and his parties, only for Nick to be met with an invite. The quote, “A chauffeur in a uniform of robin's egg blue crosses my lawn early that Saturday morning,” (Fitzgerald 41). This captures a moment when blue is used as a signifier of hope. Similarly to how Wilson's hopeful eyes are associated with blue, the blue uniform symbolizes the invite Nick was so desperately hoping