Color and Cosmos in "The Great Gatsby" Author(s): A. E. Elmore Source: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 78, No. 3 (Summer, 1970), pp. 427-443 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27541823 Accessed: 30-05-2016 22:24 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms
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COLOR AND COSMOS IN THE GREAT GATSBY By A. E. ELMORE
CfHEsuccess, GREATbut GATSBY is constantly hailed as a technical thereby often subtly condemned. "Techni cally," Henry Dan Piper has written, uThe Great Gats by was the most carefully planned and most flawlessly executed of
all Fitzgerald's novels. . . ." Yet Piper argues that Tender Is the Night was "artistically" an advance upon the earlier novel. Similarly Arthur Mizener praises Fitzgerald for committing him self in Gatsby to a "workable form which he never betrayed", while he reserves much higher praise?"Fitzgerald's finest and
most serious novel"?for Tender Is the Night. Perhaps the notion that Gatsby, for all its technical virtues, is somehow lacking
in seriousness and range of meaning is partly attributable to Fitz gerald himself, who in defending Tender Is the Night called it
a "philosophical" or "psychological" novel having different canons from a "dramatic" novel like Gatsby.
Tender Is the Night is of course a fine, if frequently flawed, novel. But The Great Gatsby is nothing less than one of the very great achievements of American literature. The technical achieve
ment of Gatsby is part and parcel of a total artistic achieve ment embodying the seriousness, catholicity, and depth one ex pects of a great work. "I want to write something new?some thing extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned," Fitzgerald wrote to a friend as he was planning the novel. The burden of this essay is to demonstrate the manner and degree of his success.
The novel is built around three major settings which are de picted primarily in terms of light and color imagery and a fourth which, though somewhat less precise in its outlines and imagery, is
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THE GREAT GATSBY
of equal importance. The settings are, in order of appearance, East Egg, the valley of ashes, West Egg, and downtown New York. Chapter I is devoted primarily to East Egg, even though other settings figure briefly. Chapter II focuses on the valley of ashes, even though part of the action is set in Manhattan. Chap ter III defines West Egg, though it too shifts to the city. Chap ter IV presents downtown New York as a setting in its own right. As the imagery becomes more and more patterned, resonant, and suggestive, these settings take on a symbolic character which em
bodies a theme more serious and universal than has, I believe, been previously acknowledged. In Chapter I the narrator, Nick Carraway, introduces the "white palaces of fashionable East Egg", particularly the per vasively white mansion of the Buchanans, who dress in white and
talk endlessly about the white race. "The idea is if we don't
look out the white race will be?will be utterly submerged," Tom
Buchanan tells Nick, not once but many times and in various forms. Daisy Buchanan mocks Tom's ideas, but in terms of skin and clothes she is even more conspicuously white than her hus band. She and her alter ego, Jordan Baker, are