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The Color White In The Great Gatsby

Decent Essays

The American Dream was a prodigious and fascinating objective, in which everyone wished to accomplish in the 1920’s. Money, social status and happiness was the ideal image. Everyone desired and craved to achieve this dream in hope to have the opportunity to acquire success and the image of a perfect life. But this dream was corrupt. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby shows us that the so called “American Dream” is in fact just an illusion everyone had but could not obtain, because everyone alway seemed to be missing something to their picture perfect life.

The color green is a critical and significant color in this novel. We see it all over the place, but the most important place we see it in, is when Gatsby is reaching out …show more content…

When we break down the color white, the main quality it represents is purity. The color white was used everywhere in the book, but there was a little twist to it. It wasn't always what it seemed, just like the American Dream. “They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown in after a short flight around the house,”(8). This quote has the character Daisy in it. When we heard Daisy we think of the flower. So delicate and innocent and full of purity, like the white petals, but once you reach the yellow middle, all she cares about is her picture perfect image. Daisy isn't what she seems “Fitzgerald carefully builds Daisy's character with associations of light, purity, and innocence, when all's said and done, she is the opposite from what she presents herself to be,”(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Once we get to know Daisy better and better, we start to realize that she is in fact the opposite. Daisy craves for people to look at her the way they look at Gatsby and think to themselves, “wow she has it all”. Daisy goes to extreme limits to make her life look as perfect as possible, even if she is completely miserable, she will keep hiding her sadness and try and live her fake life. The color white represents the American Dream because even though this idea of a perfect life is so desirable, no one really fully accomplished the goal, just like how the color white was used as innocence, when broken down, we see that it symbolizes the exact

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