[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Symbols and Colors in "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald
With the novel “The Great Gatsby”, F. Scott Fitzgerald produced one of the "small" masterpieces of American literature. Using the methods of impressionism and symbolic narrative rather than documentary realism, he succeeded in defining not only essential qualities of his own age, but in producing a tribute-ironic, perhaps, but nevertheless a tribute-to the basically idealistic vision of American material power. Whether this tribute must also be considered an epitaph, is not for us to say.
There is, in short, at the heart of The Great Gatsby - and of American materialism itself a peculiar innocence, what Andrew Turnbull calls "the extraordinary gift for hope and romantic readiness," symbolized by Jay Gatsby as he builds his "enchanted palace" for Daisy Buchanan. And Daisy in turn represents what Nick Carroway, narrator of the book, terms "a vast, vulgar, meretricious beauty." It is the non-material or ideal quality of this materialism which makes of Jay Gatsby a perpetual innocent, a dreaming adolescent, a uniquely American Don Quixote tilting at windmills with a lance of gold, winning his Enchanted Princess, and counting his silk shirts as though they were rosaries. And there was, of course, much of Fitzgerald himself in both Gatsby and Nick, the latter expressing an affirmation (or perhaps one should say a nostalgia) for the traditional moral codes of the Midwest. ( Sutton, Brian)
The Great Gatsby is a novel with a "dual hero" because Nick Carroway, the narrator, is in many respects no less important to the book than is Jay Gatsby himself. Nick, indeed, represents at least an awareness of the traditional values and moral codes that made America great. A spectator rather than inhabitant of the moral Wasteland of the Buchanan world, Nick provides a definition-through-contrast of the wasteland itself. He also serves as a means of defining the essential idealism of Jay Gatsby..........
