What Does The Green Light Symbolize In The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is the story of a man’s life long ambition to win back the love of his youth. Throughout the book, Fitzgerald uses many symbols in the novel to relay the themes of money and its role in gaining happiness, as well as the possibility of repeating the past. In The Great Gatsby, the author uses the symbols of Daisy’s pearls, colors, and the green light to develop the themes of the novel.
Through the use of Daisy’s pearls, the author reveals the theme of money cannot buy happiness, but happiness is impossible without it. Tom displays this when the day before the wedding he gave Daisy “a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars”(Fitzgerald 76). This represents Tom’s attempt to use his wealth

Two colors that are used throughout the book are blue and green. Fitzgerald states, “he had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dreams must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it” (180). The color blue is used to represent dreams and illusions. Fitzgerald shows how Gatsby has reached a level of unimagined opulence that he believed would allow him to achieve his dreams. Green represents unfaded past and in this case Gatsby’s uninterrupted quest to gain the love of his youth. This is shown when Nick sees the green light for the last time and says “I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock” (180). This quote represents how Gatsby’s dreams of Daisy are all they’ll ever be, just dreams. The symbolic colors throughout The Great Gatsby showcase the underlying truth that money, possessions and even dreams cannot bring back the

The green light symbolizes Gatsby and Daisy’s past and Gatsby’s dream of being reunited. Nick noticed that Gatsby was staring at the “single green light” and how at just the sight of it, Gatsby appears exhilarated, “he was trembling”(21). This shows Gatsby’s desperation for a repeat of his past. When Gatsby finally has Daisy back he realizes that “it is again a green light at a dock” showing his “his count of enchanted objects had diminished by one”(93). This reveals that while he now has Daisy, the light still goes out, which conveys that Daisy will never live up to his dreams of her and that they can never relive the past. The symbol of the green light represents the time of Gatsby and Daisy's faded past; when the light goes out it represents that they can never go