Fifty Shades of Gatsby

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Gray is the rudimental color tone that rules the whole novel. It betokens decadence, bleakness, corruption and disillusionment and represents moral decay, spiritual vacuousness and death. The Valley of Ashes already paints a picture of what the color consists, gray. There are withal gray cars crawling along an invisible track and ash-gray men just as Eliot’s “wasteland”, the valley is a spiritual ruin of young men in the Jazz Age. Every gray thing in the Valley of Ashes makes people feel dejected, afflicted and hopeless. The color gray covers many scenes in the novel for example, the living room of Tom’s mistress is filled with gray smoke; the guests in Gatsby’s parties have gray names; the contingency which kills Mrs. Wilson transpires in the dusk. All these gray scenes designate spiritual vacuousness, dark life, moral decadence and woeful terrible events. After Mrs. Wilson’s death, “Wilson’s glazed ocular perceivers turned out to the ash heaps, where diminutive gray clouds took on fantastic shape.” This shows Mr. Wilson’s painful state of mind and his vigorous desire to kill the owner of the yellow car. Living in the world of money worship, people’s spirit is vacuous and moral is rotted, and as if they are living in a dead desert where they are putting up a last-ditch struggle for their life, hopelessly. In the cessation of the story, the author describes that Gatsby is killed by a pale and fantastic figure. The appearance of this gray figure just shows Gatsby’s dejection and death. It withal denotes that all things including Gatsby’s dream and life are ended in the dispiriting, hopeless dark gray atmosphere.

The Great Gatsby indited by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a model for American literature in the 20th century. Fitzgerald seizes the audience with his style of inditing utilizing symbols and colors to set the mood and tone of the novel. With this method of inditing, Fitzgerald establishes the characters and feeling of the book with a concrete theme and plot all while giving a great visual of the Jazz Era in which the book was intended to reflect. The utilization of colors and tones in this novel avail the reader to cast an image or feeling when reading the book. Fitzgerald sets a mood on how the upper and lower class are portrayed and visually perceived in his classic work. The vocation of symbolism appreciates the novels egocentrically and equitably. The employment of this is an influential force that drives the literature and engenders a brilliant more surreal and radical experience for the reader.

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