What does the color yellow mean in The Great Gatsby?

Answer 1

In The Great Gatsby, the color yellow symbolizes wealth and corruption. Gatsby's car, tie, shirts and library, Jordan's hair, and the two twins' dresses at one of Gatsby's summer parties were all yellow.

Answer 2

In "The Great Gatsby," the color yellow is often associated with wealth, luxury, and materialism. It is used to portray the extravagance and superficiality of the characters in the novel, particularly Daisy Buchanan. Yellow is also linked to deceit and illusion, reflecting the hollow nature of the American Dream in the story.

Answer 3

Golden stands for

1) richness, but also

2) happy or prosperous: golden days, golden age

3) successful: the golden girl of tennis

4) extremely valuable: a golden opportunity

At Gatsby's parties even the turkeys turn to gold. "..turkeys bewitched to a dark gold" (p. 41).

Jordan Baker - the golden girl of Golf - is associated with that color. "With Jordan's slender golden arm resting in mine" (p. 44); "I put my arm around Jordan's golden shoulder" (p. 77).

With a few sentences Fitzgerald throws a light at the turbulent months while Daisy is waiting for Gatsby during the war. "All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the »Beale Street Blues« while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the grey tea hour ..." (p. 144). Here even the dust in the rooms, usually grey, is shining, while the usually golden tea is served at the grey tea hour. We find that contrast between golden and grey once more in "we went about opening the rest of the windows downstairs, filling the house with grey-turning, gold-turning light" (p. 144).

Silver represents jewellery and richness.

In The Great Gatsby the moon or moonlight or the stars are often silver: "the silver pepper of the stars" (p. 25); "The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales" (p. 48); "A silver curve of the moon hovered already in the western sky" (p. 114).

Sometimes the gold at Gatsby's house turns to yellow. Thus the richness is only a cover, a short sensation, like the yellow press for the more offensively sensational press. "now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music" (p. 42). In contrast to the golden girl Jordan, her admirers are only yellow. "two girls in twin yellow dresses"; "»You don't know who we are,« said one of the girls in yellow, »but we met you here about a month ago.«" "... we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow" (all p. 44). Remarkably Daisy's daughter has old and yellow hair: "Did mother get powder on your old yellowy hair?" (p. 111).

Gatsby has two important experiences in his life before the story starts.

(1) Dan Cody with his yacht (p.96) "that yacht represented all the beauty and glamour in the world."

(2) Daisy Fay. She wears white clothes and has a white car.

White stands for

1) morally unblemished

2) honorable '

"High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl" (Daisy, p. 115). When Nick Carraway visited the Buchanan he met two young women, of course Daisy and Jordan "They were both in white" (p. 13). Even the windows at Daisy's house are white "The windows were ajar and gleaming white" (p. 13). "Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white" (Daisy and Jordan, p. 24). "they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight" (Daisy and Gatsby, p. 106). In a El-Greco-like picture at the end of the novel "four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress" (p. 167). "His heart beat faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own" (p. 107).

Fitzgerald uses the color white for the real West, although he doesn't even mention the name of the color. "When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow" (p. 166). At the end of the novel ["the party was over" (p. 171), like the end of the Jazz Age at the Great Depression 1929] somebody soiled Gatsby's house. "On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it" (p. 171). A couple of years later Jerome D. Salinger uses this metaphor and Holden Caulfield erases at the end of The Catcher in the Rye ( Rezension) an obscene word, written at the wall. But time changes: Fitzgerald just called it "obscene", twentyfive years later Salinger named it.

Green stands for a variety of meanings, but Fitzgerald used it mainly for "not faded", like in "a green old age", or for hope. "I glanced seaward - and distinguished nothing except a single green light" (p. 25). This green light is across the sea where Buchanan's house is supposed to be. Gatsby said: "»You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock«" (p. 90); "Now it was again a green light on a dock" (p. 90); "...when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock" (p. 171); "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us" (p. 171). Later the whole water between Gatsby and Daisy gets green "On the green Sound, stagnant in the heat,.." (p. 112). Once (as far as I found it) Fitzgerald used "green" for envious or jealous: "In the sunlight his face was green" (George Wilson, p. 117).

Grey is often used for neutral, dull, not important. "grey little villages in France" (p. 48); "The grey windows disappeared" (at Gatsby's house, p. 91); "... a grey, florid man with a hard, empty face" (p. 97) about the portrait of Dan Cody in Gatsby's bedroom. Gatsby's ideal is grey and empty. The Wilsons, living in the valley of ashes, appear in grey, except for Myrtle, when she enjoys the company of Tom Buchanan. Wilson "mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity - except his wife, who moved close to Tom" (p. 28). The only way for Myrtle to get out of the grey seems to be Tom Buchanan.

Blue is the color of being depressed, moody, or unhappy.

Therefore a lot of things aroung Gatsby are blue. "In his blue gardens men and girls came and went" (p. 41). Although a lot of people are in and around his house, his gardens (plural!) are blue. "... ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves" (p. 144), of course in Gatsby's gardens. "So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves" (p. 167). After Myrtle's death George Wilson and Mr.Michaelis are in a blue mood. " ... a blue quickening by the window, and realized that dawn wasn't far off. About five o'clock it was blue enough outside to snap off the light" (p. 151). The most unhappy place is the graveyard: "He had come a long way to this blue lawn" (Carraway at Gatsby's grave, p. 171).

Pink

Sometimes Gatsby comes up with the color pink. "the luminosity of his pink suit under the moon" (Gatsby, p.136). When Gatsby and Daisy are finally together, "there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea" (p. 91).

Red associated with live, joy, love, shame, and rage.

The inside of Buchanan's home is in red. "We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colord space" (p. 13); "Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light" (p. 22).

A variety of colors

To impress Daisy Jay Gatsby brings up a pile of shirts "and covered the table in many colored disarray ... in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue" (p. 89).

Answer 4

The Great Gatsby is a novel written in 1925 but F. Scott Fitzgerald. The use of yellow in the book symbolizes the change of the characters and events. It reveals that not everything is as it seems.

Answer 5

ColorsSometimes we sound like art snobs when we talk about The Great Gatsby ("Look at the use of green! Such marvelous blues," and so forth). Honestly, it seems like there's a little too much color stuff going on here to be coincidental. Yellow and Gold: Money, Money, Money. Oh, and Death.First off, we've got yellows and golds, which we're thinking has something to do with…gold (in the cash money sense). Why gold and not green? Because we're talking about the real stuff, the authentic, traditional, "old money" - not these new-fangled dollar bills. So you've got your "yellow cocktail music" playing at Gatsby's party where the turkeys are "bewitched to dark gold" and Jordan and Nick sit with "two girls in yellow." It seems clear, then, that Gatsby is using these parties to try to fit in with the "old money" crowd. And it doesn't stop there; when Gatsby is finally going to see Daisy again at Nick's house, he wears a gold tie. Nick later mentions the "pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate," which may seem weird (since last we checked, colors didn't have a smell) until we remember Nick's description of New York as "a wish out of non-olfactory money." Odor then is associated with gold, and non-odor with money. The difference? Perhaps the same distinction as Daisy's upper class world and Gatsby's new-found wealth. While Gatsby buys a yellow car to further promote his facade, he's really not fooling anyone. Lastly, we've got Daisy, who is only called "the golden girl" once Gatsby realizes that her voice, her main feature, is "full of money." Yellow is not just the color of money, but also of destruction. Yellow is the color of the car that runs down Myrtle. The glasses of Eckleburg, looking over the wasteland of America, are yellow. This dual symbolism clearly associates money with destruction; the ash heaps are the filthy result of the decadent lifestyle led by the rich. White: Innocence and Femininity. Maybe.While we're looking at cars, notice that Daisy's car (back before she was married) was white. So are her clothes, the rooms of her house, and about half the adjectives used to describe her (her "white neck," "white girlhood," the king's daughter "high in a white palace"). Everyone likes to say that white in The Great Gatsby means innocence, probably because 1) that's easy to say and 2) everyone else is saying it. But come on - Daisy is hardly the picture of girlish innocence. At the end of the novel, she is described as selfish, careless, and destructive. Does this make the point that even the purest characters in Gatsby have been corrupted? Did Daisy start off all innocent and fall along the way, or was there no such purity to begin with? Or, in some way, does Daisy's decision to remain with Tom allow her to keep her innocence? We'll keep thinking about that one. Blue: This One's Up For GrabsThen there's the color blue, which we think represents Gatsby's illusions -- his deeply romantic dreams of unreality. We did notice that the color blue is present around Gatsby more so than any other character. His gardens are blue, his chauffeur wears blue, the water separating him from Daisy is his "blue lawn," mingled with the "blue smoke of brittle leaves" in his yard. His transformation into Jay Gatsby is sparked by Cody, who buys him, among other things, a "blue coat." Before you tie this up under one simple label, keep in mind that the eyes of T.J. Eckleburg are also blue, and so is Tom's car. If blue represents illusions and alternatives to reality, God may be seen as a non-existent dream. As for Tom's car…well, you can field that one. Grey and a General Lack of Color: Lifelessness (no surprise there)Then there is the lack of color presented in the grey ash heaps. If the ash heaps are associated with lifelessness and barrenness, and grey is associated with the ash heaps, anyone described as grey is going to be connected to barren lifelessness. Our main contender is Wilson: "When anyone spoke to him he invariably laughed in an agreeable colorless way." Wilson's face is "ashen." His eyes are described as "pale" and "glazed." It is then no coincidence that Wilson is the bearer of lifelessness, killing Gatsby among yellow leaved trees, which we already decided had something to do with destruction. Green: Life, Vitality, The Future, ExplorationLast one. We're thinking green = plants and trees and stuff, so life and springtime and other happy things. Do we see this in The Great Gatsby? The most noticeable image is that green light we seem to see over and over. You know, the green light of the "orgastic future" that we stretch our hands towards, etc. etc. We can definitely see green as being hopeful, as being the future, as being vitality and freshness. Right before these famous last lines, Nick also describes the "fresh, green breast of the new world," the new world being this land as Nick imagines it existed hundreds of years before. The new world might be green, but when Nick imagines Gatsby's future without Daisy, he sees "a new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees." Nick struggles to define what the future really means, especially as he faces the new decade before him (the dreaded thirties). Is he driving on toward grey, ashen death through the twilight, or reaching out for a bright, fresh green future across the water?

Answer 6

The color yellow in The Great Gatsby represents money. There are many other symbolic colors used in this book, such as green.

Answer 7

Is represents wealth and money.

That is shown with Gatsby's yellow car.

And when Fitzgerald describes Tom and Daisy, he says their hair is yellow.

Answer 8

Red may mean both good and bad,(light and dark)

such as War, Blood, Violence or Love, romance, flattery.

Answer 9

industrialism being a big part of society

Answer 10

peace