The Valley of Ashes as Metaphor in The Great Gatsby Essay

The author uses very descriptive imagery to illustrate, in our minds, how the Valley of Ashes looks like. He also uses personification, "a line of gray cars crawls..", including a simile, "where ashes grow like wheat." Nick tells us about a stretch of land lying a quarter of a mile between West Egg and New York which are connected by a motor road and a railroad, called the Valley of Ashes. The valley of ashes is basically the midpoint, being a colorless, desolate area of land. In fact, the somber place is home to the people who the higher class of the city tend to overlook. The novel's non-wealthy people live in the valley of ashes, which men work here by shoveling the ashes. This subdued landscape is filled with missed opportunities contrary

The author Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby as a novel that talks about and covers American issues in the 1920s. He shows in the novel the carelessness and selfishness of everybody at the same time by portraying all of them in the location of west and east egg. Fitzgerald talks about a couple different topics throughout the novel. One of those is," the Attainment of a dream may be less satisfying than the pursuit of it" and the second one is"the American Dream is corrupted by the desire for wealth". He uses those themes to show how americans lived at a different time.

Matthew J. Bruccoli argued that “Fitzgerald superimposed a partly mythical geography upon the actual geography” in The Great Gatsby. When Bruccoli stated this he simply meant that Fitzgerald created a fictitious setting, upon the real general setting of the novel. Throughout Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, he creates places and settings as the perfect examples of the 1920’s American culture and community. I agree that this is exactly what Bruccoli meant when he stated that Fitzgerald has superimposed a partly mythical geography upon the original geography. Fitzgerald has created a mythical setting geographically by letting each origin represent an important part of 1920’s American society. In this case, those represented throughout The Great Gatsby are old aristocracy, the very rich, social decay of America, and the high quest for money and pleasure. Each of which are important to the 1920’s American culture and society. Throughout the novel, the geographical places we are introduced to are East Egg, West Egg and The Valley of Ashes. Each of these places represent a part of 1920’s America. East Egg represents the old

There are two types of people, those who are consumed by money and those that have a decaying amount. Both of those types of people crave more and more, both reside in either of the two contrasting peninsulas, East Egg and West Egg. The two headlands have numerous amounts of variance with each other in the novel, The Great Gatsby. Written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the narrative is set during the 1920’s in New York City, as well as Long Island, and the two peninsulas dubbed “East Egg” and “West Egg.” There is a striking contrast between the two regions, however, not as many similarities. East Egg represents people who are vulgar and crude, who are also the social elite and old money, while West Egg represents good social values and new money. Nonetheless, both areas are equally dissatisfied with their life, always wanting more and more.

Americans carry the freedom of opportunity and social mobility, allowing any individual to prosper, depending on their tenacity to succeed. Explicitly, Gatsby’s character differentiates between the four types of people present in this world, “the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired” (79). An instrumental facet of Gatsby’s character is his aspirations to pursue his goals, with a tenacious attitude to overcome any challenges that he may face. The passion that Gatsby contains is indefinable, his constant motivation to achieve his perfect utopian world allows him to reach out for a single “green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock” (21). Peculiarly, the green light at the end of Daisy’s East Egg dock is barely visible from Gatsby’s West Egg lawn. Daisy resides along the East Egg depicting the moral decay and social cynicism of the old aristocracy, whereas Gatsby is settled along the West Egg, illustrating the newly rich of New York. The City of New York is a place for hope, a location often present in the quest to gain excessive wealth and a place full of pleasure. Moreover, the green light symbolizes Gatsby’s hope and misfortunate end with “his dream [seeming] so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him…” (180).

The Great Gatsby is a symbol itself. The Great Gatsby was written to represent the rise and fall of the American Dream. The author places the rich and wealthy lifestyle on a high pedestal while he shows the dramatic consequences of moral and social decay amongst the characters. As each turning point is revealed, the American Dream slowly crumbles in the selfish hands of those who remain ignorant to anything else in the world. The significance of the many symbolic elements in The Great Gatsby plays a role in revealing the underlying themes of the American Dream, the ongoing clash between love and wealth and social and moral destruction.

Imagine a world where one side of the equator was filled with wealth, happiness, and content. Now imagine the other side of the equator filled with poverty, sadness, and death. These two completely opposing halves enhance each other's descriptions and make one think of each side more deeply about the concept. This same scenario is also present in one of America’s favorite novels based upon the 1920s and the American dream. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald juxtaposes two contrasting places, the Valley of Ashes and New York City, using imagery to magnify the difference between reality and a fantasy, which is central to the meaning of the work.

Analysis: Fitzgerald uses ashes, fire and dust to represent poverty. Valley of ashes is a place where “ ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys”. Basically it is a place where all of the industrial factories fiery remains fall and leave the territory unsanitary. It is a place for the rich to leave their junk and seek after their American Dream

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is the compelling story of the lengths one man goes to in order to try and win back the love of his youth. In order to do so, the titular figure of the novel, Jay Gatsby, reinvents himself from the hardscrabble soldier of his younger years into an enigma of a millionaire; during his time living at West Egg, Gatsby is revered by all, but known by none. Despite the lavish lifestyle which has made him ever so well known, Gatsby is never able to win back Daisy, the girl who has for so long represented the culmination of all of his desires. To convey the complex themes of the novel, Fitzgerald makes use of the literary techniques discussed in How To Read Literature Like A Professor by Thomas C. Foster, especially in his portrayal of the geography of the Eggs and in Gatsby’s quest to win Daisy’s affection. In his novel The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald uses Gatsby’s desperate struggle to ingratiate himself into Daisy’s life to illustrate how one can never overcome the socio-economic barriers placed upon them at birth.

East Egg and West Egg are "identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay ... They are not perfect ovals ... but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual wonder to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more interesting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size."(9) In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald creates different worlds, where many different people live amongst each other. The areas of East Egg and West Egg in Long Island find isolation not just geographically, “separated only by a courtesy bay” (9), but more significantly in the way the two societies contrast. Along with East and West Egg, Fitzgerald creates another symbol

Many times we hear of society's affect on people; society influencing the way people think and act.  Hardly mentioned is the reverse: peoples' actions and lifestyles affecting society as a whole and how it is characterized.  Thus, society is a reflection of its inhabitants and in The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, it is a wasteland described as the "valley of ashes."  Since the characters of this novel make up this wasteland, aren't they the waste?  Symbolically, this waste represents the lack of ethics of the 1920's society and civilization's decay.  In The Great Gatsby, morals deficiencies such as a lack of God, selfishness, and idleness are reflective of a society as doomed as

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a story that has many different themes. Fitzgerald shows the themes that he uses through his character’s desires and actions. This novel has themes in it that we deal with in our everyday life. It has themes that deal with our personal lives and themes that deal with what’s right and what’s wrong. There are also themes that have to do with materialistic items that we deal desire on a daily basis. Fitzgerald focuses on the themes of corrupted love, immorality, and the American Dream in order to tell a story that is entertaining to his readers.

The settings and backdrops in The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, are essential elements to the formation of the characters, symbolic imagery and the overall plot development. Fitzgerald uses East and West Egg communities to portray two separate worlds and two classes of people that are technically the same their status, but fundamentally different in their ideals. The physical geography of the settings is representative of the distance between classes of the East and West Eggers. Every setting connotes a different tone and enhances the imagery of story line. From the wealthy class of the "eggs", the desolate "valley of ashes", to the chaos of Manhattan. The imagery provided by Fitzgerald becomes an important

It is often said that certain literary works and characters within such works represent real-world issues. In the work The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the character of Gatsby is shrouded in ambiguity to the reader, providing them with a possibility for personal interpretation. In the work, Gatsby’s character develops from a character representing materialism and a fixation on status to one filled with humility and selflessness for his romantic devotion towards the character of Daisy. Through this shift, the reader is provided with insight in order to draw parallels between Gatsby and two distinct periods in American history. The materialistic side of Gatsby, driven by wealth and his status in Long Island, represents the moral corruption and materialistic desires of America in the 1920s, whereas the romantically devoted Gatsby represents wartime America, devoted to sacrifice and nobility. The contrast within the life of Gatsby allows for a profound insight into the significance of the work as a representation of changing American values.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the setting of New York in the nineteen twenties performs an extensive role in the novel. Although the nineteen twenties are a time of economic prosperity, they appear to be a time of corruption and crime as well. In New York, particularly, the nineteen twenties are a time of corruption and moral scarcity. The setting is during the Jazz Age as well, where popularity, fashion, and commerce are a primary inclination. The setting of The Great Gatsby efficaciously portrays the behavior of the characters in The Great Gatsby, as well as the plot and development. The setting assiduously delineates how themes, motifs, and symbols can fluctuate in relation to the time or location. The setting of The