Symbol 3 quotes from the book that explains the symbol3 key moments when the symbol appearsMajor characters that the symbol is connected toWhat does the symbol represent? What important things does it reveal about the character, place, or ide
Water
1. “The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of transit, a thin red circle in the water. It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.”
2. “Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.”
3. “If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,” said Gatsby. “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”
When Gatsby and Daisy meet after 5 years.The pool that Gatsby is killed in.The Bay that separates Daisy and Gatsby.The mist that is covering the bay that separates Daisy’s house from Gatsby’s, almost meaning that the future is covered in mist and you cannot see what will happen with Daisy and Gatsby.
Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby
When Gatsby and Daisy meet for the first time in five years, the weather is raining, its cold and misty making the atmosphere of the situation almost miserable, and when they go outside to go over to Gatsby’s house the rain stops as if the tension has disappeared but when daisy melts down when she sees the shirts the rain starts up again. The mood changes with the weather. When Gatsby is killed and left in the pool by Wilson, the water is acting as the symbol of lost hope, gatsby realizing for the first time in a long time that he cannot be with daisy because of how different they have become over the years they have been apart.
The Eyes of Dr. T J Eckleburg
1. ”Standing behind him, Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Docter T.J Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night. ‘God sees everything,’ repeated Wilson.”
2. “Over the ashheaps, the giant eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg kept their vigil, but I perceived, after a moment, that other eyes were regarding us with peculiar intensity from less than twenty feet away.”
3. ”But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic — their retinas are one yard high.”
When George Wilson goes ‘mad’ with grief and tells Michaelis that ‘God sees everything’. When Nick goes with Tom Buchanan to the Valley of Ash to see Myrtle, he spots an advertisement of Doctor T. J Eckleburg. When Tom, Daisy, Nick, Jorden, and Gatsby all went to town and Tom, Nick, and Jorden stopped for gas at Wilsons.
George Wilson, Myrtle Wilson, Jay Gatsby
The eyes of Doctor T. J Eckleburg represent the eyes of God in the novel, and God judges and decides the fate of everyone, including the fate of death, and in this case with Myrtles and Gatsby’s death. After their deaths, the book doesn’t mention the eyes of Doctor T. J Eckleburg. This shows the amount of mistrust that was being bred over time between Wilson and Myrtle, as Myrtle was having an affair and I think Wilson knew she was having an affair but didn’t know with who, so when she died he went ‘mad’ with grief and was bent on finding who her lover was and to find who had killed her.
The Colour White
1. “They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.”
2. “… High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl.”
3. “An hour later the front door opened nervously, and Gatsby, in a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-coloured tie, hurried in.”
When Nick first goes to Tom and Daisy’s house for tea, and he sees jorden Backer and Daisy sitting on the couch n white dresses. When Gatsby said that Daisy’s voice was ‘full of money’ and Nick considers this statement. And when Nick and Gatsby set up a meeting between Daisy and Gatsby at Nicks house and Gatsby shows up in his white suit.
Daisy Buchanan, Jorden Baker
The colour white is used to symbolize, innocence, purity, and corruption in the context of the book. When Gatsby shows up at Nicks door in his white suit, it symbolizes his innocents in that moment, but it also shows his corruption in his idea of the American dream, he has distorted his view od daisy into a perfect human being without faults and that is his downfall in the end.
The Green Light
1. ”And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”
2. “Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.”
3. “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”
When Daisy come over to Nicks house for tea and Gatsby was there, the book described how his illusion of Daisy had been slightly wrong and that the green light might have gone out and turned simply into a green light.At the end of the book when Nick was thinking about how Gatsby believed in the green light and the American Dream that was his almost life.When Nick first sees Gatsby standing on the beach and he was trembling with his hand outstretched toward the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.
Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan
When Nick is thinking about Gatsby and how he believed in the green light and the American dream at the end of the book after gatsby funeral, the book says that Gatsby believed in the green light and he somehow preserved it for his own benefit in the light of having daisy to complete his ideal American dream. In the end love isn’t what Gatsby had, he didn’t love daisy he only desired her because of her money her status and her looks and that fact that other men wanted her, this all fueled him into believing that all he had to do was win daisy over and make her his wife to complete the perfect happiness in the eyes of the American society.
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