Martin Eden, Gatsby, Farewell to Term Paper

2. Discuss the green light in The Great Gatsby and the rain in A Farewell to Arms as symbols of fertility and death.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, the green light represents hope, renewal, and (since Gatsby associates the green light with Daisy) Gatsby's desire for her, as well as (in Gatsby's mind) Daisy's fecundity and fertility. In nature, green is the color of life: trees, grass, and other living things. As such, the green light symbolizes Gatsby's own hopes and wishes for the future, which revolve around Daisy. Since Gatsby associates the green light so much with Daisy, it also represents for him a sort of beacon leading him toward her.

Although within The Great Gatsby the green light symbolizes hope, life, fecundity, and fertility, in Ernest Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms, rain, which occurs often, symbolizes the opposite: impermanence, dissolution, and death, thus foreshadowing Frederic and Catherine's doomed relationship.Like Daisy's and Gatsby's relationship, the relationship of Catherine and Frederic ends when one dies prematurely.

In nature, rain causes disintegration and dissolution. For Catherine and Frederic, the rain, as the two lie together in bed with a storm raging outside, foreshadows Catherine's death and the cessation of the lovers' happy togetherness.

Catherine admits to Frederic that the storm frightens her. She muses to Frederic too, that rain in general seems to destroy things for lovers. In that same sense, the rain within this novel continually underscores how love, just like a tangible living thing, can never last forever. Like everything in the universe, love, has a life of its own and then, inevitably, a death of its own as well.

After Catherine dies, it is raining, and Frederic walks the rainy street alone. Here, to, the rain symbolically underscores death; aloneness; and the inevitable disintegration of….....