Symbolism in the Great Gatsby

        Nick explains in chapter 9, that the American Dream was originally about discovery, individualism, and the pursuit of happiness. However it has been changed by the rise of the residents of West egg (the “new money”), and with them came their relaxed social values. This epitomized by Gatsby’s dream of Daisy (the green light) being blocked out by the mist, symbolizing how Gatsby will never be able to get Daisy, as their differing social statuses mean that she is apparently better than him. Nick compares the green bulk of America rising from the ocean to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Just as Americans have given America meaning through their dreams for their own lives, Gatsby instills Daisy with a kind of idealized perfection that she neither deserves nor possesses. Gatsby’s dream is ruined by the unworthiness of its object, just as the American dream in the 1920s is ruined by the unworthiness of its object—money and pleasure. Like 1920s Americans in general, fruitlessly seeking a bygone era in which their dreams had value, Gatsby longs to re-create a vanished past—his time in Louisville with Daisy—but is incapable of doing so. When his dream crumbles, all that is left for Gatsby to do is die; all Nick can do is move back to Minnesota, where American values have not decayed.

Green is the color of promise,of hope, renewal, and ultimately the green light to which Gatsby stretches out his arms. The green light symbolically corresponds to the "green breast of a new world,"
and at the end fuses Gatsby's vision of Daisy with that of the explorers who had discovered the promise of a new continent. What ultimately preys on the vision, the goal, is that in America and by Gatsby it can only be attained through the acquisition of material possessions.

        The ‘eggs’ are symbolic of the rise of wealth in America. West Egg is inhabited by the “new money” of America (Gatsby and Nick), and the aristocratic island of East Egg is home to the “old money” of America e.g. Tom and Daisy. Despite their affluence, people from West Egg are seen as being below the members of East Egg, because they are not part of the American aristocracy.

An excellent example of symbolism in The Great Gatsby can be found in many places including, the ash heap, Gatsby's silk shirts, the green light, The Eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, and Gatsby's library. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are a pair of fading, "bespectacled" eyes painted on an old advertising billboard over the valley of ashes, "But above the grey 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. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose." They may represent God staring down upon and judging American society as a moral wasteland, though the novel never makes this point plainly. Instead, throughout the novel, Fitzgerald suggests that symbols only have meaning because characters fill them with meaning. The connection between the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg and God exists only in George Wilson's grief-stricken mind; Wilson later points to this saying, 'God sees everything' before going on his murderous rampage. The lack of solid meaning contributes to the disturbing nature of the image. And so, the eyes also come to represent the meaninglessness of the world and the uncertainty of people.

Gatsby is a symbol for the whole American experience. The corruption of his dream, by using materialism as its means and the illusion of youth and beauty as its goal, is the corruption of American
idealism, which in turn becomes the empty promise. In the end Gatsby is destroyed by his illusions of Daisy, just as the fresh landscape of America has been converted into a depressing "valley of ashes," and the sacred green light becomes nothing but a bulbburning at the end of Daisy's dock.