F. Scott Fitzgerald is famous for the detail with which he wrote the quintessential American novel, The Great Gatsby. With his well-chosen words, Fitzgerald painted in the minds of his readers a fantastic portrait of life in the Roaring Twenties, a picture rich in color and emotion. Four colors: green, gold, white and gray played a key role in the symbolic demonstration of ideas and feelings that, seamlessly woven together, made The Great Gatsby a work of literary genius of world renowned. Some of the best known and most intriguing symbolic imagery in The Great Gatsby comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald's use of the color green. Fitzgerald used green primarily to represent two human traits in Gatsby: desire for things beyond one's reach and hope for the future. The color green was first used symbolically when the character Nick Carraway was returning from a party at the Buchanans' house. He stopped before heading home, seeing the mysterious Jay Gatsby in the distance. Carraway described Gatsby by saying, "...he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, as far away as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling." Involuntarily, I looked towards the sea – and I saw nothing except a single green light, tiny and distant…” (Fitzgerald 20). As revealed later in the novel, Jay Gatsby purchased his house in West Egg in order to be near the love of his life, Daisy Buchanan, whose home's dock projected the green light Carraway spoke of. Even though Gatsby was so close to Daisy, he was unable to rekindle their romance because of her husband. The green light served as a manifestation of Gatsby's desires, strong enough for him to gaze upon, but far enough away to retain its heartbreaking intangibility. The ...... middle of paper ......26). Not only was the Valley of Ashes described as gray, but so were its inhabitants. Fitzgerald fashioned George Wilson as a witless and demoralized lower-class American worker. He emphasized this lack of animation and vitality by describing Wilson as covered in the same gray, choking dust that covered the rest of the valley. Fitzgerald used gray in this case to convey a sense of lifelessness to the reader and deepen the symbolism of the Valley of Ashes. Unlike his symbolic use of bright colors elsewhere in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald chose to illustrate in his words the Valley of Ashes and the people who lived there with the color gray, symbolizing the bleakness of the area and the lack depressing. of hope that the people who lived there displayed.Works CitedFitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print.