The Great Gatsby

1
The Great Gatsby

• Recurring Images

2
Recurring Images
Color
Eyes or Vision
Wasteland
Sunlight / Shadows
Death
Time
3
(No Transcript)
4
Gold
Chapter 1 The front was broken by a line of
French windows , glowing now with reflected gold
. . . .
Chapter 5 An hour later the front door opened
nervously and Gatsby in a white flannel suit,
silver shirt and gold-colored tie hurried
in. His bedroom was the simplest room of
all--except where the dresser was garnished with
a toliet set of pure dull gold. Daisy admired
this aspect or that of the feudal silhouette
against the sky, admired the gardens, the
sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of
hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odor
of kiss-me-at-the-gate. Chapter 6 And if you
want to take down any addresses heres my little
gold pencil . . . .
5
White
Chapter 1 The only completely stationary object
in the room was an enormous couch on which two
women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored
balloon. They were both in white and their
dresses were rippling and fluttering . Our white
girlhood was passed there. Our beautiful white
----- Chapter 3 Dressed up in white flannels I
went over to his lawn . . . .
Chapter 4 She dressed all in white and had a
little white roadster and all day long the
telephone rang in her house . . . .
Chapter 7 Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous
couch, like silver idols, weighing down their own
white dresses against the singing breeze of the
fans.
6
What color is a daisy?
High in a white palace the kings daughter, the
golden girl . . . DAISY
7
Green
Chapter 1 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
Chapter 4 Sitting down behind many layers of
glass in a sort of green leather conservatory we
started to town.
Chpater 5 Gatsby You always have a green light
that burns all night at the end of your
dock. Now it was again a green light on the dock
Chapter 7 In the sunlight his face was green.
Chapter 9 Gatsby believed in the green light, the
orgastic future that year by year recedes before
us.
8
Other Colors
Lavender bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender a
new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery of
romances that were not musty and laid away
already in lavender
Blue . . . hope sprang into his light blue eyes
(Wilson) . . .a uniform of robins blue egg. . .
In his blue gardens . . . .
Pink a pink and gold billow of foamy clouds above
the sea a pink glow from Daisys room He Gatsby
wears a pink suit.
9
The telling eyes
of the main characters
Chapter 1 Two shinning, arrogant eyes had
established dominance over his face . . .
(Tom) Her face was sad and lovely with bright
things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate
mouth . . . (Daisy) Her grey, sun strained eyes
looked back at me with polite reciprocal
curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented
face. (Jordan)
Chapter 7 . . . Now I was looking at it again,
through Daisys eyes. It is invariably saddening
to look through new eyes at things upon which you
have expended your own powers of adjustment Her
frightened eyes told whatever intentions,
whatever courage she had had, were definitely
gone. Chapter 5 I think he revalued everything
in his house according to the measure of response
it drew from her Daisys well-loved eyes.
10
The Eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg
Chapter 2 The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are
blue and gigantic-- their retinas are one yard
high. They look out of no face, but instead
from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which
pass over a nonexistent nose. Chapter 7 I turned
my head as if I had been warned by something
behind. Over the ashheaps the giant eyes of
Doctor T.J. Eckleburg kept their vigil . . .
. Then as Doctor T.J. Eckleburgs faded eyes came
into sight down the road . . . .
Chapter 8 Standing behind himGeorge Michaelis
saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes
of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg which had just emerged
pale and enormous from the dissolving night. God
sees everything, repeated Wilson.
11
Owl Eyes Chapter 3 A stout middle-aged man with
enormous owl eyed spectacles was sitting somewhat
drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with
unsteady concentration at the shelves of
books. Absolutely real--have pages and
everything. I thought theyd be a nice durable
cardboard. Matter of fact theyre absolutely
real. Dont ask me, said Owl Eyes, washing his
hands of the whole matter. Chapter 9 Owl eyes
spoke to me at the gate. I couldnt get to the
house, he remarked. Neither could anybody
else. Go on! He started.Why, my God! They
used to go there by the hundreds. He took off
his glasses and wiped them again outside and
in. The poor son-of-a-bitch, he said.
12
The landscape About half way between West Egg
and New York the motor-road hastily joins the
railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a
mile so as to shrink away from a certain desolate
area of land. This is a valley of ashes-- a
fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into
ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where
ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and
rising smoke . . . Then the valley of ashed
opened out on both sides of us The
characters They were careless people, Tom and
Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and
then retreated back into their money or their
vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept
them together, and let other people clean up the
mess they had made . . . . Gatsby No--Gatsby
turned out all right at the end it is what
preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the
wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my
interest in the abortive shadows and short-winded
elations of men.
Wasteland
13
Sunlight and Shadows For a moment the last
sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her
glowing face her voice compelled me forward
breathlessly as I listened-- then the glow faded,
each light deserting her with lingering regret
like children leaving a pleasant street at
dusk. We slid out from the mass of the station
into the glowing sunshine. Over the great
bridge, with sunlight through the girders making
a constant flicker upon the moving cars. . . .
Gatsby got himself into a shadow . . . It
occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must
be a blind . . . . When he realized what I was
talking about, that there were twinkle-bells of
sunshine in the room, he smiled like a weatherman
. . . . The room. shadowed well with awnings,
was dark and cool.
14
Death A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped
with blossoms, followed by two carriages with
drawn blinds and by more cheerful carriages for
friends. Myrtles body was wrapped in a blanket
and then in another blanket as though she
suffered from a chill in the hot night lay on a
work table by the wall. . . . The chauffeur--he
was one of Wolfsheims proteges-- heard the
shots . . . . It was after we started with
gatsby toward the house that the gardner saw
Wilsons body a little way off in the grass, and
the holocaust was complete.
15
Chapter 1 In my younger and more vulnerable years
my father gave me some advice that Ive been
turning over in my mind ever since. Chapter 2 All
I kept thinking over and over was You cant live
forever (Myrtle) Chapter 4 One October day in
nineteen-seventeen-- Chapter 5 Luckily the clock
took this moment to tilt dangerously at the
pressure of his head, whereupon he turned and
caught it with trembling fingers and set it back
in place. He had been full of the idea so long,
dreamed it right through to the end, waited with
his teeth set, so to speak,at an inconceivable
pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was
running down like an overwound clock. Chapter 6
I wouldnt ask too much of her, I ventured.
You cant repeat the past. Cant repeat
the past? he cried incredulously. Why of course
you can! He looked around him wildly, as
if the past were lurking here in the shadow of
his house, just out of reach of his hand.
Time
16
The ending . . .
17
Most of the big shore places were closed now and
there were hardly any lights except the shadowy,
moving glow of a ferryboat across the sound. And
as the moon rose higher the inessential houses
began to melt away until I gradually became aware
of the old island here that flowered once for the
Dutch sailors eyes-- a fresh, green breast of
the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees
that had made way for Gatsbys house, had once
pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of
all human dreams for a transitory enchanted
moment man must have held his breath in the
presence of this continent, compelled into an
aesthetic contemplation he never understood or
desired, face to face for the last time in
history with something commensurate to his
capacity to wonder. And as I stood there,
brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of
Gatsbys wonder when he first picked out the
green light at the end of daisys 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.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the
orgastic future that year by year recedes before
us. It eluded us then, but thats no matter--
tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms
farther . . . . And one fine morning--- So we
beat on, boats against the current, borne back
ceaselessly into the past. The Great
Gatsby F.Scott Fitzgerald