The Great Gatsby

Recurring Images

Color

Eyes or Vision

Wasteland

Sunlight / Shadows

Death

Time

GoldChapter 1

The front was broken by a line of French windows

, glowing now with reflected goldgold . . . .

Chapter 5An hour later the front door opened nervously and Gatsby in a white flannel suit, silver shirt and goldgold-colored tie hurried in.

His bedroom was the simplest room of all--except where the dresser was garnished with a toliet set of pure dull goldgold.

Daisy admired this aspect or that of the feudal silhouette against the sky, admired the gardens, the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate.

Chapter 6“And if you want to take down any addresses here’s my little goldgold pencil . . . .”

WhiteChapter 1The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in whitewhite and their dresses were rippling and fluttering .

“Our white girlhood was passed there. Our beautiful whitewhite -----”

Chapter 3Dressed up in white white flannels I went over to his lawn . . . .

Chapter 4She dressed all in white white and had a little whitewhite roadster and all day long the telephone rang in her house . . . .

Chapter 7Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols, weighing down their own whitewhite dresses against the singing breeze of the fans.

What colour is a daisy?

High in a whitewhite palace the king’s daughter,

the goldengolden girl . . .

DAISY

GreenChapter 1Involuntarily I glanced seaward-- and distinguished nothing except a single greengreen light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock

Chapter 4Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of greengreen leather conservatory we started to town.

Chapter 5Gatsby: “You always have a greengreen light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”

Now it was again a greengreen light on the dock

Chapter 7In the sunlight his face was greengreen.

Chapter 9Gatsby believed in the greengreen light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.

Other ColoursLavender

bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender

a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery

of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender

Blue. . . hope sprang into his light blue eyes (Wilson)

. . .a uniform of robin’s blue egg. . . In his blue gardens . . . .

Pinka pink and gold billow of foamy clouds above the sea

a pink glow from Daisy’s room

He [Gatsby] wears a pink suit.

Chapter 1

Two shinning, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face . . . (Tom)

Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth . . . (Daisy)

Her grey, sun strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. (Jordan)

Chapter 7

. . . Now I was looking at it again, through Daisy’s eyes. It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment

Her frightened eyeseyes told whatever intentions, whatever courage she had had, were definitely gone.

Chapter 5

I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her [Daisy’s] well-loved eyes.

The telling eyes of the main characters

Chapter 2

The eyeseyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are blue and

gigantic-- their retinas are one yard high. They

look out of no face, but instead from a pair of

enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose.

Chapter 7

I turned my head as if I had been warned by something behind. Over the ashheaps the giant eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg kept their vigil . . . .

Then as Doctor T.J. Eckleburg’s faded eyeseyes came into sight down the road . . . .

Chapter 8

Standing behind him[George] Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyeseyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg which had just emerged pale and enormous from the dissolving night.

“God sees everything,” repeated Wilson.

The Eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg

Owl EyesChapter 3

A stout middle-aged man with enormous owl eyed spectacles was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books.

“Absolutely real--have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact they’re absolutely real.”

“Don’t ask me,” said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of the whole matter.

Chapter 9

Owl eyes spoke to me at the gate.

“I couldn’t get to the house,” he remarked.

“Neither could anybody else.”

“Go on!” He started.”Why, my God! They used to go there by the hundreds.”

He took off his glasses and wiped them again outside and in.

“The poor son-of-a-bitch, he said.

The landscapeAbout half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes-- a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke . . .

Then the valley of ashes opened out on both sides of us

The charactersThey were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures

and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . . .

GatsbyNo--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive shadows and short-winded elations of men.

Wasteland

Sunlight and ShadowsFor a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened-- then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

We slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine.

Over the great bridge, with sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars. . . .

Gatsby got himself into a shadow . . .

It occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind . . . .

When he realized what I was talking about, that there were twinkle-bells of sunshine in the room, he smiled like a weatherman . . . .

The room. shadowed well with awnings, was dark and cool.

Death

A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blossoms, followed by two carriages with drawn blinds and by more cheerful carriages for friends.

Myrtle’s body was wrapped in a blanket and then in another blanket as though she suffered from a chill in the hot night lay on a work table by the wall. . . .

The chauffeur--he was one of Wolfsheim’s proteges-- heard the shots . . . .

It was after we started with gatsby toward the house that the gardner saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.

Time

Chapter 1

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave

me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

Chapter 2

All I kept thinking over and over was “You can’t live forever”

(Myrtle)

Chapter 4

One October day in nineteen-seventeen--

Chapter 5

Luckily the clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his head, whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers and set it back in place.

He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak,at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.

Chapter 6

“I wouldn’t ask too much of her, I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

The ending . . .

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until I gradually became aware of the old island here that flowered once for the Dutch sailors’ eyes-- a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he never understood or desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity to wonder.

And as I stood there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter-- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . . And one fine morning---

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The Great Gatsby

F.Scott Fitzgerald