1(2)2016+.pdf


Reading Artistic Prose through 
Colour Terms

(“The Great Gatsby” 
by F.Scott Fitzgerald)

The question of colour terms and their functioning inEnglish literature has long been the center of scholarly
attention, and especially in the last few decades colour terms
have been studied in terms of their lexical, phraseological and
linguocultural  values. The present article focuses on the
significance of colour terms as all-important ‘elements’ of
philological reading,  something the study of which might
make  the process of reading an enjoyable and rewarding one. 

We proceed from the assumption that the philologically
oriented reader should penetrate into the author’s artistic
design as deeply as possible and  in doing so  create visual
images of his own provided every aspect of the linguistic
expression that the text can offer is taken into account.  In this
respect the use of colour terms proves especially important
since it can be viewed as  one of the basic means of encoding
the author’s purport in the text. As the previous research
shows1, whenever an author introduces a colour term into his
or her text, it is always done for a particular purpose.

Our analysis is based on the text of The Great Gatsby by
F.Scott Fitzgerald, the well-known American author of the Jazz
Age. In the  novel  colour seems to play an increasingly
important role. It introduces ‘polyphony’ in the text - the
polyphony of colour and meaning which almost acquires a
symbolic significance. Of special interest here is the beginning
of the novel, where the writer introduces Daisy, his main

heroine, to the reader, as if setting her in a painting of an interior, dressed all in white:

The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that
seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew
curtains in at one end and out at the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward
the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured
rug, making a shadow on it, as wind does on the sea.
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.

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Armenian Folia Anglistika Linguistics

Irina Maguidova

Natalia Decheva