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Color and Cosmos in "The Great Gatsby"Author(s): A. E. ElmoreSource: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 78, No. 3 (Summer, 1970), pp. 427-443Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27541823Accessed: 30-05-2016 22:24 UTC

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COLOR AND COSMOS IN THE GREAT GATSBY

By A. E. ELMORE

CfHE GREAT GATSBY is constantly hailed as a technical success, but thereby often subtly condemned. "Techni cally," Henry Dan Piper has written, uThe Great Gats

by was the most carefully planned and most flawlessly executed of all Fitzgerald's novels. . . ." Yet Piper argues that Tender Is the Night was "artistically" an advance upon the earlier novel. Similarly Arthur Mizener praises Fitzgerald for committing him self in Gatsby to a "workable form which he never betrayed", while he reserves much higher praise?"Fitzgerald's finest and most serious novel"?for Tender Is the Night. Perhaps the notion that Gatsby, for all its technical virtues, is somehow lacking

in seriousness and range of meaning is partly attributable to Fitz gerald himself, who in defending Tender Is the Night called it a "philosophical" or "psychological" novel having different canons from a "dramatic" novel like Gatsby.

Tender Is the Night is of course a fine, if frequently flawed, novel. But The Great Gatsby is nothing less than one of the very great achievements of American literature. The technical achieve ment of Gatsby is part and parcel of a total artistic achieve ment embodying the seriousness, catholicity, and depth one ex pects of a great work. "I want to write something new?some thing extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned," Fitzgerald wrote to a friend as he was planning the novel. The burden of this essay is to demonstrate the manner and degree of his success.

The novel is built around three major settings which are de picted primarily in terms of light and color imagery and a fourth which, though somewhat less precise in its outlines and imagery, is


428 THE GREAT GATSBY

of equal importance. The settings are, in order of appearance, East Egg, the valley of ashes, West Egg, and downtown New York. Chapter I is devoted primarily to East Egg, even though other settings figure briefly. Chapter II focuses on the valley of ashes, even though part of the action is set in Manhattan. Chap ter III defines West Egg, though it too shifts to the city. Chap ter IV presents downtown New York as a setting in its own right. As the imagery becomes more and more patterned, resonant, and suggestive, these settings take on a symbolic character which em bodies a theme more serious and universal than has, I believe, been previously acknowledged.

In Chapter I the narrator, Nick Carraway, introduces the "white palaces of fashionable East Egg", particularly the per vasively white mansion of the Buchanans, who dress in white and talk endlessly about the white race. "The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be?will be utterly submerged," Tom Buchanan tells Nick, not once but many times and in various forms. Daisy Buchanan mocks Tom's ideas, but in terms of skin and clothes she is even more conspicuously white than her hus band. She and her alter ego, Jordan Baker, are <cboth in white" on Nick's first visit, and on his only other recorded visit to East Egg the girls are again wearing "white dresses". On the latter occasion Nick compares them to "silver idols". Still later, he speaks of Daisy as "gleaming like silver" when he is recalling the impression she made as a young lady in Louisville on Lieutenant Jay Gatsby, who saw her "white face [come] up to his own" when he first made love to her. During those Louisville years, as described by Jordan Baker, Daisy "dressed in white, and had a little white roadster".

White, even after one excludes near-synonyms such as silver, makes more appearances in the novel than any other single color, and something like three of every four are applied to East Egg or characters from East Egg, especially to Daisy. Even the ap parent exceptions sometimes contribute to the pattern. For ex


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ample, Nick wears "white flannels" to the first party he attends at Gatsby's. Although he lives on West Egg, Nick is a relative of Daisy's and much closer to her social milieu than to Gatsby's. Indeed, at the very beginning of the novel, Nick states flatly that Gatsby "represented everything for which I have an un affected scorn". To take another example, Gatsby, whose custom ary caramel-colored or pink suits virtually define the man, wears on one occasion a "white flannel suit". The occasion is his

long-awaited reunion with Daisy. Although Nick's first visit with the Buchanans extends well

into the evening, there is throughout the visit an emphasis on light. When he arrives, the windows are "glowing now with reflected gold" of the sun. Jordan's eyes are "sun-strained". The porch is "open toward the sunlight", and candles flicker on the table. Nick sees Daisy "winking ferociously toward the fer vent sun". "For a moment," he says slightly later of Daisy, "the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face. . . ." Still later, the candles are re-lit. Even inside, "the crimson room bloomed with light." At the end of Nick's visit the Buchanans stand "side by side in a cheerful square of light". Driving home, Nick frames the gas-pumps he passes in "pools of light", and he describes the night itself as "bright".

The word "bright" serves to connect light itself with the per vasive whiteness we have observed. Again, the word is applied most frequently to Daisy. "Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth. . . ."

Well over a third of the total appearances of "bright" in the novel occur in Chapter I alone, although the novel includes nine chapters which, except for the very long Chapter VII, are roughly similar in length. The remaining appearances include a description of Daisy's smile when she reunites with Gatsby, of Daisy's windows on the night of Gatsby's vigil after the auto mobile accident, and, in a flashback, of Daisy's porch in Louis ville.



The Buchanans represent the rich, old-family wing of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant America in the era immediately follow ing World War I. Daisy represents one of its enduringly fa

miliar faces?Southern gentility ("Our white girlhood. . . . Our beautiful white [girlhood]," as she calls it)?while Tom repre sents another?enormous wealth gleaned from "the dark fields of the republic" and refined by Eastern education. Daisy is the former Daisy Fay of Louisville, forever gleaming, forever bright. Tom is "Tom Buchanan of Chicago", which is to say Lake Forest, who has gone to Yale and, after many wander ings, settled in the East. He is a true Nordic up to his hair?"a sturdy straw-haired man". Evidently he is Protestant. We have Nick's word in Chapter II that Daisy is not a Catholic, in a context which suggests that neither is Tom. There is little doubt about Tom's national origin. Buchanan is an old Scottish name,1 conspicuously associated with American history because of Franklin Buchanan, first Superintendent of the Naval Acad emy and later a Confederate naval officer, and because of Presi dent James Buchanan. "Fay" is not so obviously British, but one meaning of the word is "a white person".

The whiteness of East Egg, however, may suggest more than a social class. In both the Neoplatonic and Judeo-Christian tra ditions, white (which is to say unbroken light) is symbolic of the One, or of God, or of His abode. Shelley, who was in Fitz gerald's own words "a God to me once", adopted the Neoplatonic color symbolism in A don?is when he figured the created world (life) as a "dome of many-coloured glass" and the milieu of the

One (eternity) as "white radiance". In Revelation, heaven is persistently described as white. As Gatsby stares across the courtesy bay at East Egg near the end of Chapter I, Nick says that he has "come out to determine what share was his of our

local heavens". In terms of imagery, the local heaven is clearly East Egg.

1Strictly speaking, then, not Anglo-Saxon, but within the province of that term as it is applied to any American, particularly a Protestant, of British descent.


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Note that in addition to light and whiteness, air characterizes this setting. Nick enters East Egg on a "windy evening". Even inside the Buchanans' house, the wind is playing.

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. 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. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a pic ture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

This passage represents more than mere physical description. There is no reason inherent in the physical setting for Nick to fancy that the girls "had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house". Nick clearly means to suggest certain intangible qualities, and throughout the remainder of the chapter he employs images of air, suspension, and flight, often metaphori cally. Jordan sits as if "balancing something" upon her chin. Nick observes that her lips "fluttered". He uses an extended metaphor of flight: "The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased al together." There are unobtrusive metaphors in such statements as "The telephone rang inside, . . . and ... all subjects vanished into air." What is suggested is a non-terrestrial, suspended world

3



whose inhabitants float or fly or sit "completely motionless" as if "buoyed up" on air.

By contrast, the valley of ashes presented in Chapter II is dusty, obscure, and, above all, gray.

About 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 deso late 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 and, finally, with a tran scendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crum bling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes 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 non existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

Dr. Eckleburg's eyes are blue and his spectacles are yellow, but they have been "dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain", and the oculist who set them up perhaps "sank down himself into eternal blindness". What is not explicitly gray in the valley of ashes is, to use Nick's own words, "im penetrable", "obscure", "dimmed", "dim", "dismal", "bare",


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"dust-covered", "shadow [y]", "faded", "ashen", "veiled", "pale", "blurred", "hazy", "darkening", "blind", "black"?or otherwise drab in color. Except for a sprinkling of Buchanan white which we shall consider later, the colors in this chapter tend to range from dull to dark. Myrtle Wilson is first seen wearing a blue dress, but even it is "spotted" and the blue is "dark", and she later changes into another of "brown figured muslin". From a "gray old man" she buys a dog with a "brown washrag of a back". She selects a "lavender-colored" taxicab, but Nick does not fail to note that it has "gray upholstery". Neither color nor light lingers.

Then I heard footsteps on a stairs, and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door.

... we slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window. . . .

. . . everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it, although until after eight o'clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun.

An overwhelming number of the references in the novel to gray, to other dark colors, and to darkness and dimness themselves are applied to the valley of ashes and its inhabitants.

Fitzgerald's valley of ashes has been frequently compared to Eliot's waste land, but the differences are more instructive than the similarities. Eliot's waste land is not, in terms of its imagery and mythology, specifically Christian. Fitzgerald's valley of ashes is. The eyes of an oculist wearing enormous spectacles "brood on over the solemn dumping ground". The Greek word Gehenna?"hell" in most English versions of the New Testa ment?was derived from the Valley of Hinnom, a constantly burning garbage-dump south and west of Jerusalem. In Dante



and Milton, among others, hell is a place of obscurity and dark ness?"darkness visible". Fitzgerald changed George B. Wil son's hair color from "yellow" to "pale", obviously to make it fit better with his surroundings. Fitzgerald's gray inhabitants of the valley are ghostly people, ash-gray men with leaden spades.

Myrtle Wilson walks through her husband "as if he were a ghost". Later in the novel the murderous Wilson appears, Satan like, as an "ashen, fantastic figure gliding . . . through the amor phous trees". The ash-gray men work beside a line of gray cars which "crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak", reminiscent perhaps of Hawthorne's "Celestial Railroad". Fi nally, "the valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river," after the manner of Dante's Inferno.

If East Egg is characterized by pure white light and the valley of ashes by the absence of light, West Egg is characterized, es pecially in Chapter III, by the broken light of the prism or rain bow?the "many-coloured glass" of A don?is or the "various light" of Marvell's "Garden". This "many-colored" setting, as Nick himself describes it in a later chapter, encloses "enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden". The "halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors." Among these primary colors, yellow (often in the form of gold) is at once the most conspicuous and the most pervasive.

Gatsby's station wagon "scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains". "Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived. . . ." Pastry pigs and turkeys are "bewitched to a dark gold". The bar has "a real brass rail". The orchestra plays "yellow cocktail music". Two girls wear "twin yellow dresses", and Nick associates this color with them no fewer than five times before the chapter is out. Jordan's arm is "golden". A man wearing "enormous owl-eyed spectacles"?afterwards known simply as Owl-Eyes?inspects Gatsby's library. The motif of West Egg yellow recurs in subsequent chapters. Gats


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by's Rolls-Royce, the "death car" which strikes down Myrtle Wilson, proves to be yellow. Gatsby wears a "gold-colored tie" for his reunion with Daisy. Even the toilet set which Daisy in spects on that occasion is of "pure dull gold". Much later, after his reunion with Daisy has proved to be incommensurate with Gatsby's great vision, Gatsby walks disconsolately among "fruit rinds", the remainders of the oranges and lemons of Chapter III. In a flashback centered on his lonely return to Louisville after Daisy's marriage, Gatsby watches a "yellow trolley" racing his day-coach and wonders if the people in it might "once have seen the pale magic of her face along the casual street". Indeed, the association of yellow or gold with Gatsby begins even before the novel does. On the title page appears a little four-line poem which Fitzgerald attributed to Thomas Parke d'Invilliers, a character in his first novel, This Side of Paradise:

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!"

Only a few months before publication Fitzgerald considered naming the novel Gold-Hatted Gatsby. Our final view of the living Gatsby in Chapter VIII is under "yellowing trees". Yellow makes more appearances than any other single color

except white, and both yellow and gold are applied pre dominantly to West Egg and in particular to Gatsby. (Note that the Egg-islands both appear in egg colors?East Egg in white and West Egg in yellow.) West Egg yellow is the color of precious metal, of harvest, of the sun, of callow youth ; it is, in short, the color of this created universe. Gatsby's "glowing garden" (the word "garden" appears again and again in Nick's descriptions of Gatsby's estate) represents a version of Eden. It is a world which is still close to the water from which it has

only recently been separated, a world of sandy beaches and



hydroplanes and swimming pools. (The interested reader will discover that once again Nick's diction, especially his metaphors, reflects a preoccupation with the distinguishing element, this time water?the moon is "floating in the Sound" and trembling to the "drip" of the banjoes, and "a sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows. . . .") As R. W. B. Lewis has ob served, Gatsby is an Adamic figure. Even after his initiation, even after West Egg has lost its innocence because of the corrupt ing influence of Daisy-Eve, the setting remains a symbol of this pendant world, now shockingly fallen. Gatsby's final vision is a dramatic reconstruction of what Adam might have felt as he looked up after tasting the forbidden fruit. "He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real. . . ." Gatsby receives his baptism of fire in his swimming pool, dying in the water as Myrtle had died in the dust.

The final setting of the novel, downtown New York, comes in to its own in Chapter IV, though it has appeared earlier as a sort of extension of other settings, as in Chapter II. Downtown New York is a chameleon-like place, taking its color from those who enter it. Thus in Chapter II Myrtle selects a taxicab with gray upholstery and buys a dull-colored dog from a gray old man. Tom duplicates his world by putting her up at "one slice in a long white cake of apartment-houses". In Chapter IV, when Gatsby takes Nick downtown, Nick sees "skins of tigers flaming" in the young Gatsby's fictional palace on the Grand Canal. In addition he sees a "piece of metal, slung on a ribbon", which is Gatsby's reward for valor from little Montenegro, the "sunlight through the girders" as the two men cross the Queensboro Bridge, and the "yolks of . . . eyeballs" which belong to three Negroes who pass them as they cross Blackwell's Island. With no single dis tinguishing color of its own, the downtown setting reveals its


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character largely through imagery drawn from fire or its mani festation, heat. (Air, earth, and water have distinguished, re spectively, the three previous settings.) In Chapter IV, Nick sits with Gatsby and Meyer Wolfsheim in a restaurant during the hottest part of the day?"roaring noon". In Chapter VII, the climax of the novel, Nick travels from the city to East Egg on the "warmest" day of the year, and he returns with the others to the city while Daisy and Jordan bemoan the unbearable heat. Like the fire of purgatory, the heat of the city is purifying, sepa rating the dross from the true metal. It reveals Daisy as the weak, vacuous person she is during the confrontation in the Plaza suite between Gatsby and Tom, but it brings out the real strength, integrity, and sacrificial devotion of Gatsby, who even after hav ing lost Daisy keeps vigil outside her window and protects her from the consequences of the manslaughter she has committed, though it leads to his own death.

Gatsby (whose name suggests "gat", which was gangster jar gon for "gun" in the 'twenties) represents on one level the rising lower orders which so threatened Tom Buchanan and WASP

society in general. (The blond, blue-eyed George B. Wilson? with an obviously British name which, like Buchanan, had made its way into the White House?is another representative of the lower orders, but he never threatens because he can never rise.

He knows and keeps his place, even if it is in hell.) Gatsby is a German immigrant's son who has risen to wealth through the underworld. He is, to Tom, "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere". If Gatsby can win away Daisy, Tom can only feel confirmed in his worst fears of a cultural Armageddon. Today German immi grants; tomorrow Negroes.

Yet Gatsby represents much more. From his r?le as Adam in the garden, he moves toward the grander r?le of the second

Adam, Jesus. He is forever stretching out his arms under "our local heavens", or standing under a "wafer of a moon", this "figure of the host", with "his hand up in a formal gesture of



farewell". "He was a son of God?a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that?and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faith ful to the end." Gatsby is thus a sacrificial but not a tragic figure.

His death stems not from hubris but from devotion to Daisy, who is nothing less to Gatsby than the Platonic ideal for which he had created "his Platonic conception of himself". Still, Gatsby does have a flaw, and it leads at least indirectly to his fall. He weds his vision to an inferior object?"he had committed himself to the following of a grail"?and like Lancelot he is thereby cor rupted and deterred from searching for the true Grail. The son of God allies himself to a mortal and, "betrayed", loses the power which made him divine. Or, in another image, the Platonic lover forsakes the ladder of love, which would lead him to some sort of

mystical union or fulfillment, for the physical woman: "Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees?he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable mile of wonder." Afterward, having forfeited his right to climb alone, he knew that "his mind would never romp again like the mind of God."

The fact that Daisy is a "mixed" character illustrates how the novel can be at once "simple" and "intricately patterned". She is associated with white clothes, white cars, white houses, and the

white race, but she is also "the golden girl" with "yellowy" hair. Her name reflects this mixture of colors: the daisy usually bears white rays around a yellow disk. All of this is appropriate, for she is torn between Tom and Gatsby. Still another color is associ ated intimately with Daisy?the green of her dock light, at which Gatsby stared so many nights before his reunion with her. Green makes relatively few appearances in the novel, and we should not


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overlook its appearance as the color of Gatsby's seat in one of his two yellow cars. In the climactic Chapter VII, Gatsby and Tom argue over who will drive what car.

cShall we all go in my car?' suggested Gatsby. He felt the hot, green leather of the seat. 'I ought to have left it in the shade.'

'Is it standard shift?' demanded Tom. <Yes.' 'Well, you take my coup? and let me drive your car to

town.' The suggestion was distasteful to Gatsby.

What the men are really struggling over is Daisy?an example of transference which is made more obvious and concrete by the green leather which Gatsby touches. Daisy is "mixed" in still another sense. She is the mortal who receives incarnation from

Gatsby, the son of God, under the Louisville trees. She is also Fay?fairy, herself seeming to partake of the supernatural, the divinely immortal.

What can we make of these hells and heavens, devils and gods? They are, in the first place, the remnants of the novel with "a catholic element" of which Fitzgerald spoke as he was planning Gatsby and of which his short story "Absolution" was to have been a part. But they are not merely vestigial ; the very theme of the work inheres in them. East Egg is presented as heaven because Nick is being true to Gatsby's original vision of it as the goal of his son-of-God visions. The valley of ashes, where the enormous, brooding eyes of Eckleburg parody those of the crea tive spirit of God which "dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast Abyss/And mad'st it pregnant . . ." in Paradise Lost} is literally a place where God is absent except as "an advertisement". The description is that of the Greek boy Michaelis, as he comforts the bereaved George B. Wilson after Myrtle's death?Michaelis, from Michael, the prophetic angel. Gatsby's world, West Egg,



begins as uncorrupted Eden and evolves into the fallen, mortal world?the West of the setting sun. The purgatory of the fiery inner city is a place of confrontation and suffering, but also?un like the valley of ashes?a place from which escape is possible. "Human sympathy has its limits, and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind." Of course all of this is nothing if not ironic. East Egg is heavenly only in Gatsby^s pristine vision of Daisy Fay Buchanan. The inhabitants of the valley of ashes are never diabolical in the way that, say, Tom Buchanan is. Purgatory is set squarely in the world's most glamorous city, the city which "seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world". The world itself?West Egg?moves, as we have seen, from Edenic innocence to the odor of postlapsarian mortality, only at the end to move again and assume the very qualities which earlier had been associated with the "heaven" of East Egg.

The ironic use of color imagery and symbolism can perhaps best be illustrated by Fitzgerald's use of white. The heavenly whiteness of East Egg begins as a symbol of beauty, goodness, and truth as Nick attempts to be faithful to Gatsby's vision of Daisy's world. However, after Nick has gauged how utterly un godly?indeed inhuman?the Buchanans really are, their white ness (which even from the beginning has undertones of evil as in Tom's racial ideas) takes on an ugly and markedly evil character. Nick's final meeting with them?or rather with Tom, since Daisy never reappears after Gatsby's death?is a brilliant account of the nature of one kind of evil. Nick defines it?almost charitably, one might say?as "vast carelessness". Whatever its proper name, it is symbolized by "a pearl necklace?or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons" which Tom goes into a jewelry store to buy. The pearl of great price has been cast before swine, and the pearl itself has come to seem swine-like. The cuff buttons recall the horror

of the corrupt Wolfsheim's cuff links, made from human molars.


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Whiteness allied with evil seems peculiarly appalling, as Ish mael saw when he reflected on the whiteness of Moby Dick. After speaking of such "whites" as those in the vision of St. John in Revelation, Ishmael observes, "yet for all these accumu lated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood." Ishmael proceeds to describe the worst form of this "panic" or terror: "This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when di vorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any ob ject terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds." Surely by the end of The Great Gatsby Tom Bu chanan, who is guilty of nothing less than a form of premeditated

murder and who nonetheless can say, "That fellow had it coming to him," even as he invites Nick to pity him because of his mis tress's death ("And if you think I didn't have my share of suffer ing?look here, when I went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting there on the sideboard, I sat down and cried like a baby"), must seem to any reader with moral sanity an "object terrible in itself". The straw-haired man has a headpiece filled with straw and a heart whose darkness is now fully visible. In the background the white, white Daisy? for whom the pearl necklace is presumably intended?also seems a "grotesque thing", like all the "scarcely created world" in Gatsby's final vision.

Yet Fitzgerald's technique does not end with ironic inversion. Before the end of the novel, white regains its traditional symbolic value as it is applied, at last, to Gatsby. On his last night in the East, Nick revisits Gatsby's "huge incoherent failure of a house". There he commits the most significant symbolic act in the novel. "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, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone." With



this act Nick almost literally wipes Gatsby's slate clean. Gatsby's emergent whiteness is left intact. It is the only whiteness which is. Thus, though Gatsby has, like Adam, lost his Eden, his Eve, and his very life at least partly as the result of a single mistaken moral choice?to pursue an inferior object of adoration?he has in Nick's eyes gained, with his sacrificial death, all of the heavenly qualities implied by whiteness. It is only an extension of Fitz gerald's own imagery to say that Gatsby is "saved". He is not saved from a literal hell to go to a literal heaven, any more than Goethe's Faust is. But the essential purity of his "religion" of romantic idealism is confirmed by Nick's act.

Surely one misses the meaning of this act?and of the symbolic imagery generally?when one assumes, as Piper does, that Gatsby is "irretrievably damned" and that the romantic idealism he embodies is likewise condemned. The Great Gatsby is not, as Piper believes, a tragedy, because its protagonist is not finally a tragic hero. As Nick says in the opening chapter, "Gatsby turned out all right at the end." Gatsby has, perhaps, sufficient great ness for a tragic hero, and he has a flaw which prepares him for a fall. But the fall is directly the result, not of his flaw, but of Tom Buchanan's. Tom informs George B. Wilson of the identity of the death-car's owner, knowing, one must suppose, that Gatsby's death will be the almost certain consequence. Gatsby does everything possible to protect Myrtle's real killer, Daisy, and finally gives his life as part of the effort.

Furthermore, our final perspective on the events of the novel is not Gatsby's but Nick Carraway's. (Carraway's very name can suggest not only the carelessness he shared at first with the Buchanans?"care-away"?but also his ultimate ability to carry away the lesson of Gatsby's life as he returns to the West and reconstructs the story.) Nick's perspective takes the form of what we might call, in contradistinction to the "dying fall" Fitz gerald used at the end of Tender Is the Nighty the "living rise". I am referring to the sense of promise and renewal implied by


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Nick's final vision of the Dutch sailors viewing the "fresh, green breast of the new world". Nick revives the terrible vision of

Gatsby's last moments, of "a new world, material without being real", but in a context which, despite Nick's explicit fatalism, sug gests hope and rebirth. Note that at last green is here applied to living, growing things, instead of to dock lights and automobile seats. Thus the novel is finally a vindication of romantic idealism and not, as Piper claims, a criticism of it. It does not represent, as Piper also claims, "a retreat toward . . . the bosom of Mother Church". It is true that Fitzgerald started out to write a novel with a catholic element, but he ended by adopting the imagery and framework of his native Catholic Christianity to delineate an essentially romantic and hence secular world-view. Although, in an age of unbelief and vast carelessness, the romantic idealist like Gatsby is almost certain to be defeated before he reaches his particular goal, there remains the enduring consolation, super seding tragedy and perhaps making it impossible, that the vision ary pilgrim who is faithful to the end will find the journey itself sufficient victory. The Great Gatsby endures as a monument not only to that notion but also to Fitzgerald's underrated power to build a universal theme from a brilliantly effective technical structure.


color and cosmos in 'the great gatsby'€¦ · color and cosmos in the great gatsby by a....

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