The Great Gatsby Symbolism Essay

Moving on can be a near impossible truth to accept. In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, this idea was used to convey a love expressed between two characters. The story was narrated by Nick Carraway, a man who became friends with a neighbor by the name of Jay Gatsby. Nick’s cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband, Tom Buchanan, lived across the lake from them in a neighborhood referred to as East Egg. As Nick began to know Gatsby, he found how he loved the woman across the lake. The novella continued to revolve around a few key pictures, which are referred to as symbolism. Symbolism is defined as an image used for representation of something else that has a deeper meaning (“Symbol”). Examples of this include the Dr. T. J. Eckleberg billboard,
For instance, the billboard with the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg could potentially signify the eyes of God. The Valley of Ashes was considered a dark, frightening place. As the eyes sat over the hill watching all that went on in the Valley of Ashes, they saw many terrible things; one of those things was an accidental murder. Daisy running down Mrs. Wilson in Gatsby’s car was witnessed by the billboard, among many other human witnesses (p. 137). Although the billboard could not actually say anything, it had seen the awful actions created by Daisy. In the same way many people believe God watches over us, the eyes did a similar thing. Even George Wilson believed they resembled God to an extent. Before his wife died, he told Michaelis, he took her to the window to see the eyes and claimed “You can’t fool God!” meaning he knew the eyes on the billboard represented his beliefs (p. 159). This was the last time the reader heard of the eyes as they had done their job for the story. However, the reader does not need to read that the eyes are specifically there to know they were always watching. Although they were not a complete representation of one’s total belief system, they did a great job of symbolizing