… a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns. Each of the main characters cars that are described in detail give an accurate description of that person’s personality.
#MIGGEST SYMBOLS IN THE GREAT GATSBY DRIVERS#
The cars are also a symbol of the person who is in the drivers seat. The damage had been done, the prophecy fulfilled, and the cars would not hurt Gatsby anymore. Sure enough, Myrtle gets ripped open by a car, Gatsby’s car to be exact.Īt the end of the book, at Gatsby’s funeral, Nick looked around to find some other cars.
The woman gets a broken arm, which symbolizes the fact that someone Tom loves will get hurt by one of these death traps called cars. The second broken wheel comes about when we learn of Tom’s accident with the woman he was cheating on Daisy with just a few months after his marriage to Daisy. This helps the reader learn that the characters are not very good in their dealing with social problems and that trying to deal with these problems will result in tragedy.
#MIGGEST SYMBOLS IN THE GREAT GATSBY DRIVER#
To which the reply was, “Well if you’re a poor driver you oughtn’t to try driving at night” (Fitzgerald 59). It happened and that’s all I know” (Fitzgerald 59). Also, the driver states, “I know very little about driving-next to nothing. They don’t really realize how corrupt they are and how they act towards other people. The same can be said for the main characters. This partygoer is so out of it, that he doesn’t even realize what has happened. A drunken partygoer runs off of the road and breaks off his wheel. The first time this happens is after one of Gatsby’s parties. This is a very ominous place and with the hearse and black limousine written in, the reader gets the feeling that this will be the setting for a very dreadful incident.Īnother indicator of the doom to befall the characters in the book is the lost wheel, which comes up a couple of times. The only other color of cars described in the valley of ashes is gray (Fitzgerald 27). It’s as if death were driving by and laughing with his knowledge of the dark future for Gatsby’s car, and for Gatsby.
On this bridge, any number of different types of cars could have driven by, but a hearse and a black limousine were chosen to help maintain Fitzgerald’s use of cars as a symbol. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled towards us in haughty rivalry. As we crossed Black Wells Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of south-eastern Europe and I was glad the sight of Gatsby’s splendid car was included in their somber holiday. This paragraph in the book is very dark, and it helps set the awful mood for the rest of the book.Ī dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two carriages with drawn blinds and by more cheerful carriages for friends. The dead man wentĪn incidence of this is when Nick and Gatsby are driving over the Queensboro Bridge on their way to the valley of ashes. Fitzgerald deliberately chose to put the words drove, implying cars, and death, together. A line from the book that really drives this home is, “So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight” (Fitzgerald 143). Throughout the book, there are many devastating and dark events that these cars represent. One of the most important jobs of cars in this book is to foreshadow upcoming events. Cars also give the reader insight into some of the different characters in the book. “…cars change their meaning and become a symbol of death” (Dexheimer). The Great Gatsby is a very dark, unhappy book, and the cars really exemplify this. Cars play a very important part in the telling of The Great Gatsby.
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