Jan Biasbas 
Ms. O’Keefe 
American Literature 
December 17-18, 2018 
 

Gatsby One-Pager 
The Great Gatsby has offered many symbolism and patterns using colors and
also riddles that F. Scott Fitzgerald left for the readers to discover and also to solve. I
believe that most of Fitzgerald’s color symbolism had something to do with wealth and
power. Examples of the Great Gatsby using color symbolism is when Nick and Gatsby
were talking about the war describing “-some wet, gray little villages in France (47)”. In
this color symbolism, the color matters because when a person thinks of something that
is gray and also wet (would also relate to blue and it could also mean sadness), they
would tend to compare gray to something that is boring, poor, or even compare it to
labor that poor people had to go through. Connecting to parts of the movie we’ve seen
last week, I could connect this to the scene where it showed many gray colors that
representing factories and also pollution. I believe that Fitzgerald included these parts in
the Great Gatsby to symbolize or even enhance the wealth of people who uses colors
such as yellow, white, blue, and even purple. This also connects back to my claim
because this had something to do with wealth because poverty and the gray color gets
overshadowed by colors that represent wealth like what I said: Yellow, white, blue, and
even purple.
Another color symbolism that is mentioned a lot of times or has been described a
lot of times is white. The color white represents purity, elegance, and might even mean
wealth. We’ve seen the color white get mentioned as wealthy and elegance before like
“Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the
water (8)”, “They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if
they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house (10)”, and “In the
early morning the sun threw my shadow westward as I hurried down the white chasms
of lower New York to Probity Trust (61)”. The color of white mentioned in the first piece
of evidence was connected to a palace. A palace is a big and elegant building (could
also be a mansion) that is connected to wealthy and important people. So having a
white palace means the person who owns that palace is very rich and important. The
color of white mentioned in the second piece of evidence is connecting it to dresses and
how dresses, especially the ones with pure white, are connected to wealth. The color of
white mentioned in the final piece of evidence connects it to pure and light. “The sun
threw my shadow westward as I hurried down the white chasms” means that once he
  
entered the white chasms, shadow and darkness are unable to be present. Shadows
and Darkness relates to evil and white relates to good and pure. I believe Fitzgerald
included this color symbolism (specifically white) because it’s telling us how wealthy and
pure the color white can be being compared to palaces, dresses, and even light. This
also serves the purpose of being the opposite of gray because for gray, it represents
poor, poverty, and also labor (the pollution of factories poor people had to work at);
however, for white it represents pure and wealth being compared to palaces and
dresses. This connects back to my claim because wealth is usually connected to the
color white, purple, blue, and yellow and white is one representation of how powerful
these colors are wealth wise.
Therefore, I believe my claim regarding Fitzgerald’s use of color symbolism is
true because he uses colors to represent the poor, boring, and poverty life (which is
gray) and the brightful, pure, and wealthy life (which is yellow, white, green, blue, an
purple). I think Fitzgerald’s motif is really about expressing different colors to represent
different meanings of each individual color, like red meaning mischievous, adultery,
romance and green can mean cash green, wealth, and power, to make the story more
colorful and to make readers compare colors to different types of items, things, people,
etc.