Wednesday, October 1, 2014

What does the green light and Doctor Eckleburg's eyes symbolize?

In The Great Gatsby, green symbolizes: the American dream, money, go, envy, Daisy, youth, spring, fertility, inexperience, boyhood.  Gatsby worships the green light: Nick observes him bowing down to it.  It is the confluence of all of Gatsby's hopes and dreams and his desire to retreat to the past, to when America was the young, fertile, all-possible land.


Gatsby equates the color to Daisy, as she embodies Gatsby's desire to repeat the past.  He covets his first love, but he does not realize that she is corrupt (maybe she was always corrupt).  So his pursuit of all that is green is a false quest, and it will inevitably end in failure.  Gatsby fails to realize that Daisy doesn't symbolize any of these things: Daisy's voice is full of money, but she doesn't say anything; she's not fertile (she's a terrible mother); he cannot recapture his youth (the past cannot be repeated).   Notice the contrast of "fresh green breast of the new world" to Myrtle's flapping, destroyed breast after she is hit by Daisy.  The pursuit of the green light results in slaughter.


The Eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg symbolize the deus abscondi world: a world in which God is hidden or removed.  In this kind of world, God cannot be perceived or seen; He works in revelation (symbols, omens, colors).  God has been removed from Gatsby's world, and he leaves this billboard to serve as such.  Notice that it is placed in the Valley of Ashes: God is revealing that the world is a corrupt place like Sodom and Gomorrah (also destroyed by fire: left in ashes).  Fitzgerald's morality is indirect but clear: materialism leads to carelessness and death.

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