Grey In The Great Gatsby Essay

Although many people think of bright parties and colors while reading The Great Gatsby the book is full of very sad and depressing content. There is a plethora of very twisted parts of the book that get overlooked because of the very exciting parts. For example the color grey plays a very important part to the book but isn’t used much or even thought of. Grey can be used in the depressing, dull and even dirty parts of the book. In The Great Gatsby the color grey is used to represent the people who were never able to achieve the American dream and are stuck in the valley of ashes, and how Gatsby feels throughout the book. The first way that grey is used in The Great Gatsby is to show all the people stuck in the Valley of Ashes who never achieved the American dream. The Valley of Ashes is an industrial wasteland where all the working people stay. The Valley of Ashes is the color grey to show how dirty and depressing it is to live there. In the Valley of Ashes you can see an “Occasional line of grey cars crawl along an invisible track, gives out a ghostly creak, and comes to rest immediately the ashes of grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight” (27). This quote is showing how barren the

Throughout the entire story Wilson is struggling with making money through his business. He isn’t like the other characters who have an easy life, he has to work for everything and gets repaid with a cheating wife. His entire life is just very depressing and bland. You can see as “ Wilson’s glazed eyes turned out to the ash heaps, where the small grey clouds took on fantastic shapes and scurried here and there in faint drawn wind” (167). By that you can see how bland his life actually is, it’s saying how his “lifeless” eyes were just looking out over the horizon and just be amazed with