“Gatsby turned out all right at the end,” narrator Nick Carraway reflects in the opening pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s timeless novel The Great Gatsby. “It is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.” The destructive dust that plagues Gatsby permeates the life of every character that passes through the valley of ashes, a desolate wasteland nestled between the newly affluent West Egg and the bustling metropolis of New York City. This consuming dust renders each uniquely miserable and unfulfilled; it clouds even the brightest moment with a pervading darkness. Though the valley of ashes lacks the glamour of East Egg and the lively soirees of West Egg, Fitzgerald uses his initial description of the locale to underscore its significance. His grim selection of words, melancholy tone, and evocative use of figurative language poignantly reflect to the reader the underlying desolation and hopelessness that characterize the author’s commentary on the social structure of the early 1920s.
Fitzgerald infuses his description of the valley of ashes with a plethora of words that evoke the valley’s bleakness and misery. Everything therein is “desolate,” “grotesque,” “crumbling,” “dimmed,” “solemn,” “foul,” and “grey” (Fitzgerald 23-24). The grayness alone is ironically spectacular, for Fitzgerald’s work is defined by its use of brilliant colors, from Daisy’s virginal white to Gatsby’s luxurious gold. That he characterizes the valley with such a muted, achromatic shade betrays the hopelessness that underlies Fitzgerald’s novel. Though the characters themselves are saturated with bright, spectral hues, the worl...
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...hances his perception of the novel as a whole.
In the 1920s, Americans enjoyed the benefits of economic and political prosperity. It was an era characterized by frivolous luxury and rampant excess, of the quest to fulfill the American Dream. Surely success could be bought and sold; surely an emptiness of spirit could be filled for the right price. As Americans sought fulfillment in the material, F. Scott Fitzgerald recognized that their loneliness remained, an unyielding gray dust that plagued even the most wealthy, an emotional vacancy that could not be filled with any measure of wealth. The valley of ashes, Fitzgerald’s symbolic characterization of this spiritual poverty, endures as a poignant reminder of the ultimate futility of money and as the graveyard of the American Dream.
Works Cited
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 2004.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American classic, The Great Gatsby, tells a story of how love and greed lead to death. The narrator of the novel, Nick Carraway, tells of his unusual summer after meeting the main character, Jay Gatsby. Gatsby’s intense love makes him attempt anything to win the girl of his dreams, Daisy Buchanan. All the love in the world, however, cannot spare Gatsby from his unfortunate yet inevitable death. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald utilizes the contrasting locations of East Egg and West Egg to represent opposing forces vital to the novel.
Weather is not just the state of the atmosphere. The Valley of Ashes is not just a dumping ground filled with pollution. The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are not just a pair of eyes on a billboard. Colors are not what people think they are. The green light is not just a light that is green. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a very classic American novel, written in the year 1925 and is one of many novels that people extol as one the most outstanding and spectacular pieces of American fiction of its time during 1920s America. It is a novel of great accomplishment as well as catastrophe, being noted for the astonishing way its author captures
Through his vivid depiction of the valley of the ashes in the acclaimed novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald unveils the truth about 1920s America: economic prosperity did not guarantee happiness and resulted in depreciating conditions for those that were not able to connive their way to the top.
Gatsby makes many mistakes throughout the novel, all of which Fitzgerald uses these blunders as a part of his thematic deconstruction of the American Dream. However, Fitzgerald does not write Gatsby as a bad person whom embodies all that is wrong with western capitalism. Instead, Fitzgerald portrays Gatsby as a good man who was victim of the qualities ingrained in him by an imperfect ideological system. It is this distinction which makes Fitzgerald’s argument all the more potent, and his audience’s ability to mourn Gatsby as a tragic figure all the more important. Whereas Fitzgerald’s opinion of Gatsby may otherwise have been misconstrued as a negative one, the scene of Gatsby’s funeral clearly conveys the character of Gatsby as a tragic and sorrowful one.
The 1920s of United States history is riddled with scandal, post-war morale, and daring excursions in efforts break away from a melancholy time of war. Pearls, cars, and dinner parties are intertwined in a society of flappers and bootleggers and F. Scott Fitzgerald uses this picturesque period to develop a plot convey his themes. In his The Great Gatsby, functioning as an immersive piece into the roaring twenties, Fitzgerald places his characters in a realistic New York setting. Events among them showcase themes concerning love, deceit, class, and the past. Fitzgerald uses the setting of the East and West Eggs, a green dock light, and a valley of ashes to convey his themes and influence the plot.
...26). Not only was the Valley of Ashes described as gray, but its people were as well. Fitzgerald fashioned George Wilson as a spiritless and demoralized lower-class American worker. He highlighted this lack of animation and vitality by describing Wilson as covered with the same stiflingly gray dust that carpeted the rest of the Valley. Fitzgerald used gray in this case to convey a feeling of lifelessness to the reader and deepen the symbolism of the Valley of Ashes. In contrast to his symbolic use of bright colors elsewhere in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald chose to illustrate with his words the Valley of Ashes and the people who lived there with the color gray, symbolizing the bleakness of the area and the depressing lack of hope that the people living there displayed.
Fitzgerald uses setting to criticise society’s loss of morality and the growth of consumerism after the Great War. The rise of the stock market in the 1920s enabled business to prosper in America. However, although the owners of industry found themselves better off wages didn’t rise equally, causing the gap between the rich and poor to grow markedly. Parkinson argues that the settings “represent [these] alternative worlds of success and failure in a modern capitalist society”. The valley of ashes symbolises this failure and moral decay, acting as a foil to the affluent “world of success”, East Egg, and highlighting that the lower classes must suffer to support its existence. This setting is introduced in Chapter 2 and is described as where “ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens”. The personification of the environment creates the sense that these failures are rooted in the land, suggesting that poverty is an inescapable part of American society. This is emphasised through the use of tripling which creates a sense of endlessness. By describing the men who live there as “crumbling through the pow...
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life. The occasional insights into character stand out as very green oases on an arid desert of waste paper. Throughout the first half of the book the author shadows his leading character in mystery, but when in the latter part he unfolds his life story it is difficult to find the brains, the cleverness, and the glamour that one might expect of a main character.
In striking contrast, Fitzgerald described Gatsby’s parties as mischievous, yet sophisticated. There wasn’t any spinning or strobe lights like there was in the film, because things such as that weren’t available commercially in the 1920’s. Gatsby’s parties weren’t the only place to be vitalized. The Novel and Film Valley of Ashes were in evident contrast. The “Film Valley of Ashes” did have ash, but it was far from barren.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a novel with underlying themes of social class, wealth, and the rise and fall of the American Dream. Fitzgerald conveys these themes +through symbolism. One of the symbols used in The Great Gatsby to represent the American Dream is the Valley of Ashes. The Valley of Ashes is located between West Egg and New York City and is described as a dreary, gray, and depressing home to the lower class, such as the Wilson family. The people inhabiting The Valley of Ashes are hopeless people who struggle through poverty while those who inhabit West Egg live luxurious lifestyles. The inhabitants of The Valley of Ashes are victims of the American Dream and of the wealthy that used them to pursue their own desires. The Valley of Ashes symbolizes the failure of the American Dream and the moral and social decay inflicted by the desire of wealth.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is set in the nineteen twenties and takes place in New York and Long Island. Long Island is composed of West Egg and East Egg, two rich cities that are in this novel. However, between New York City and West Egg, there is an area called the valley of ashes which consists of desolate land created by the dumping of industrial ashes. In it, live the poor. Its denizens live like that because the rich only look out for themselves. Fitzgerald uses symbolism to show moral decay and the representation of the poor who must always live in despair.
By exploring the physical site of the valley, followed by the inhabitants of the valley – George and Myrtle, George representing the working class and Myrtle the exception, extending this to the references of the valley to Gatsby’s humble origins, the Valley of the Ashes represents the low social mobility and the failure of the American Dream.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, paints vivid picture of the lives of upper and lower classes together and their interactions during the Roaring 20’s. Fitzgerald does this by showing the readers the true nature and purpose behind the upper class and the manipulation they use against anyone lower than them. An example of this manipulation would be Tom Buchanan, a wealthy man married to Daisy Buchanan, lying George Wilson, a lowly poor individual running a mechanics shop, about selling a car, just to see the man’s wife. This poor man, Wilson, lives in “The Valley of Ashes”, an almost desolate area on the way to New York from West and East Egg. This valley is a representation of the manipulation and reckless behavior of the upper class. Through The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald paints a picture of the 1920’s by portraying the upper class as immoral and careless through their actions, and their opinions.
In Francis Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the city of New York possesses a “transitory” and “enchanted” quantity, which “for the last time in history” rivaled man's “capacity for wonder” (182). New York City, a symbol of American greatness and the American dream, contains very unamerican class distinction: those whose families have been prominent and rich for decades function as a de facto aristocracy, looking down upon and controlling (through vast wealth) the poor. These class distinctions are mirrored by geography, dividing up the maps into regions by wealth. The parallelism of the region and the residents results in the region symbolizing the residents. Through analyzing both the residents and the description of the region, a holistic understanding can be gained about the residents of Valley of Ashes, East Egg, and West Egg.
In brief, the world of The Great Gatsby can seem as sordid, loveless, commercial, and dead as the ash heaps presided over by the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. Indeed, this atmosphere is so essential that one of the alternate titles Fitzgerald considered was Among the Ash-Heaps and Millionaires. Fitzgerald using the valley of ashes, illustrates an environment where love has lost its place, which destroys hope for a family; the eyes of T.J. Eckleburg, clearly intended to represent those of God, emphasizes that this lack of love and filial piety in a sin against themselves as well as society and God.