Great Gatsby: Weather Effects Hope

Rain, snow, and sun force people to adapt their lives. Weather can be a powerful symbol of emotion and passion. Writers and authors draw from the natural wonders to enhance their literature. In the novel, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses weather to symbolize hope in the main character, Jay Gatsby. Gatsby had a small chance of being with Daisy, his love, because of his poor ancestry. In the novel, pleasant weather represents hope in Daisy and Gatsby’s relationship, while inclement weather represents despair in their relationship. Fitzgerald uses the weather to portray Gatsby’s hope for Daisy and Gatsby.

When Gatsby and Daisy meet after not seeing each other for five years, the weather portrays how the hope of their relationship grows. Before Gatsby reunites with Daisy for the first time, he feels nervous and excited at the same time. His feelings are similar to a rainstorm. A rainstorm tends to be dense and mysterious, but when lightning strikes, the storm becomes exciting. At the same time Daisy and Gatsby share their feelings, and began to talk to each other, the rainstorm stops. “He smiled like a weather man , like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light, and repeated the news to Daisy. ‘It’s stopped raining’” (Gatsby 89). Coincidentally, the rainfall stops when Gatsby engages Daisy in conversation. After it stops raining, Daisy, Nick, and Gatsby walk over to Gatsby’s house.

As Gatsby impresses Daisy with his magnificent mansion, Daisy sees a glimpse of good weather coming in the near future. “The rain was still falling but the darkness had parted, and there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea.”… “I’d like to just get on one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push” (94). The image of the storm parting with the pink and golden clouds forming shows a chance of pleasant weather could come in the near future. As the weather shifts throughout the novel, Daisy and Gatsby’s relationship progresses. When the weather is troubling, Daisy and Gatsby are far apart; whereas when they see a glimpse of nice weather, their relationship gains hope.

Gatsby finally realizes that his and Daisy’s relationship ended at about the same time summer was coming to an end. Summer tends to have the most pleasant and beautiful weather. Nick, the narrator of the novel, visions Gatsby sensing that autumn was on its way. “I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come.”… “He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found grotesque thing in a rose and how the raw sun light was upon the scarcely created grass” (161). Gatsby feels this way after secretly watching Daisy and Tom having a civilized dinner; he discovered that they had reconciled their differences. Even before Gatsby’s death, he realizes that there is no hope for him and Daisy after this incident. Fitzgerald uses the symbol of a pleasant streak of weather coming to an end, to show that all of Gatsby’s hopes are destroyed.

Throughout the novel, weather dictates the hope Gatsby has for his dream of being with Daisy. When Daisy and Gatsby meet for the first time since before the war, their relationship grew from old lovers to lovers once again. At the same time the weather in the novel went from a depressing rainfall to a sign of delightful weather seen in the midst of darkness. That imagery demonstrates the progression of Gatsby’s hope in his and Daisy’s relationship. However, when the streak of delightful weather comes to an end, the hope for Gatsby and Daisy’s relationship ends as well. F. Scott Fitzgerald captures the relationship between Daisy and Gatsby, in the changes of weather.