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

land is and how nothing happens so whenever anything moves people can get excited. Also it shows how in the Valley of Ashes is used for nothing except work.
The color grey can be seen through the character Wilson and how he also never achieved the American dream.

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

clouds.
Finally you can see the color grey throughout the emotions of Gatsby himself. Gatsby was a very happy man until him and Daisy split up that’s when he got very upset. Through the entire book Gatsby was very sad until Daisy came back into his life. You can see how Fitzgerald showed Gatsby’s emotions when him and Daisy were talking at Nick’s house and when he was upset the skies were grey but when he was happy they were sunny. It is also shown when Nick says “We talked for a moment about some wet, grey little villages in France” (52). Which is showing how boring and depressing his life is because he doesn’t have what he really wants, which is Daisy.
Although The Great Gatsby was a very interesting book it took a few very dark turns into reality. It shows how some people in real life actually feel. Which can be seen through the people who have never achieved the American dream, and how Gatsby’s emotions flow throughout the story. The Great Gatsby can be compared to some people’s lives that are still living today who try to hide behind their money instead of expressing their true feelings.