Chapter 9: Colors Symbols

GREEN

"He wonders how the first settlers to America must have felt staring out at the “green breast” of the new continent, and imagines Gatsby’s similar wonder when he realized that tiny blinking green light across the bay belonged to Daisy Buchanan."

Here the green symbolizes Nick connecting Gatsby’s American Dream of winning Daisy’s love to the American Dream of the first settlers coming to America. Both of these dreams were noble, and ultimately much more complicated and dangerous than anyone could have predicted. Green symbolizes nobility and the American Dream that Gatsby and the first settlers have in common.

The symbolism of green throughout the novel is as variable and contradictory as the many definitions of “green” and the many uses of money—”new,” “natural,” “innocent,” “naive,” and “uncorrupted”; but also “rotten,” “gullible,” “nauseous,” and “sickly.” I found this while researching about chapter 9 after ideas it and it makes sense that the color green symbol changes through out the book because it can mean rotten like when food molds and turns green. Or it can also mean natural like grass is the color green and new like money and how you can buy new things with it.


YELLOW

Yellow stands for corruption.
“Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?” and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate."

Here yellow cars are in chicago which is back on the west side where he is from. So to
Me there is corruption no matter where you go in the US. So I'm kind of confused then this line is said.
"I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress."

For the color white does this mean that the women are dressed in a pure color and look pure but aren't. White in this book symbolizes purity and innocents, but drunk women does not sound very innocent to me. The colors in this last chapter kind of confuse me the easiest to understand was the green. Help me out PLEASE!