DANIEL J. SCHNEIDER is a professor of English and chairman of the Department of English at Windham College, in Vermont. He has published a number of essays on the fiction of Fielding, Henry James, Conrad, Hemingway, and Hawthorne in various journals of literary criticism and is writing a book on symbolism in the fiction of Henry James.

The vitality and beauty of F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing are perhaps nowhere more strikingly exhibited than in his handling of the color-symbols in The Great Gatsby. We are all familiar with "the green light" at the end of Daisy's dock-that symbol of the "orgiastic future," the limitless promise of the dream Gatsby pursues to its inevitably tragic end; familiar, too, with the ubiquitous yellow-symbol of the money, the crass materialism that corrupts the dream and ultimately destroys it. What apparently has escaped the notice of most readers, however, is both the range of the color-symbols and their complex operation in rendering, at every stage of the action, the central conflict of the work. This article attempts to lay bare the full pattern.
The central conflict of The Great Gatsby,, announced by Nick in the fourth paragraph of the book, is the conflict between Gatsby's dream and the sordid reality-the foul dust which floats "in the wake of his dreams." Gatsby, Nick tells us, "turned out all right in the end"; the dreamer remains as pure, as inviolable, at bottom, as his dream of a greatness, an attainment "commensurate to [man's] capacity for wonder." What does not turn out all right at the end is of course the reality: Gatsby is slain, the enchanted universe is exposed as a world of wholesale corruption and predatory violence, and Nick returns to the Midwest in disgust. As we shall see, the color-symbols render, with a close and delicate discrimination, both the dream and the reality-and these both in their separateness and in their tragic intermingling.
Now, the most obvious representation, by mean...