DANIEL J. SCHNEIDER is a professor of English and chairman of the Department of English at Windham College, in Vermont. He has published a number of essays on the fiction of Fielding, Henry James, Conrad, Hemingway, and Hawthorne in various journals of literary criticism and is writing a book on symbolism in the fiction of Henry James. The vitality and beauty of F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing are perhaps nowhere more strikingly exhibited than in his handling of the color-symbols in The Great Gatsby. We are all familiar with "the green light" at the end of Daisy's dock-that symbol of the "orgiastic future," the limitless promise of the dream Gatsby pursues to its inevitably tragic end; familiar, too, with the ubiquitous yellow-symbol of the money, the crass materialism that corrupts the dream and ultimately destroys it. What apparently has escaped the notice of most readers, however, is both the range of the color-symbols and their complex operation in rendering, at every stage of the action, the central conflict of the work. This article attempts to lay bare the full pattern. The central conflict of The Great Gatsby,, announced by Nick in the fourth paragraph of the book, is the conflict between Gatsby's dream and the sordid reality-the foul dust which floats "in the wake of his dreams." Gatsby, Nick tells us, "turned out all right in the end"; the dreamer remains as pure, as inviolable, at bottom, as his dream of a greatness, an attainment "commensurate to [man's] capacity for wonder." What does not turn out all right at the end is of course the reality: Gatsby is slain, the enchanted universe is exposed as a world of wholesale corruption and predatory violence, and Nick returns to the Midwest in disgust. As we shall see, the color-symbols render, with a close and delicate discrimination, both the dream and the reality-and these both in their separateness and in their tragic intermingling. Now, the most obvious representation, by means of color, of the novel's basic conflict is the pattern of contrasting lights and darks. Gatsby, Nick tells us, is "like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light." His imagination has created a "universe of ineffable gaudiness," of "a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty"-a world of such stirring vividness that it may be represented now by all the colors of the rainbow (Gatsby's shirts are appropriately "coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue"), now simply by light itself, by glitter, by flash. In his innocence, Gatsby of course sees only the pure light of the grail which he has "committed himself" to follow. The reader, however, sees a great deal more: sees, for example, the grotesque "valley of ashes," "the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it"- the sordid reality lying beneath the fictions of the American dream of limitless Opportunity and Achievement. If for a time "the whole front" of Gatsby's mansion "catches the light," if  the house, "blazing with light" at two o'clock in the morning, "looks like the World's Fair," the reader understands why it comes to be filled with an inexplicable amount of dust everywhere and why "the white steps" are sullied by "an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick." Fair and foul is the intermingling of [13/14] dream and reality; as Nick observes in Chapter VIII, there is a "gray-turning, gold-turning light" in the mansion, and the moral problem for the young Mid-westerner is to prevent himself from mistaking the glittering appearance for the true state of things. The light-dark symbolism is employed with great care. It is not accidental, for example, that Daisy and Jordan, when they are introduced to the reader in the first scene of the novel, are dressed in white. In this scene, in which almost all of the color symbols are born, Nick tells us that "the only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. 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." White traditionally symbolizes purity, and there is no doubt that Fitzgerald wants to underscore the ironic disparity between the ostensible purity of Daisy and Jordan and their actual corruption. But Fitzgerald is not content with this obvious and facile symbolism. White, in this early appearance in the novel, is strongly associated with airiness, buoyancy, levitation. One is reminded of the statement in Chapter VI that for Gatsby "the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing." Daisy and Jordan seem about to float off into the air because they are-to both Gatsby and Nick-a bit unreal, like fairies (Daisy's maiden name is Fay); and they are in white because, as we learn in Chapter VII, to wear white is to be "an absolute little dream": ACHIEVEMENT [Daisy's] face bent into the single wrinkle o