The Valley Of Ash In The Great Gatsby

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The Valley of Ash is a very unique setting unlike the other settings of The Great Gatsby. The Valley of Ash shows a desolated and impoverished land haunted by unpleasant day to day mentality. You could say it is like a buffer zone between East and West egg, perhaps a representation of no man’s land. No man’s land was the land between the Allies and Axis trenches in World War I which had just ended in the narrative of the book. It’s a twilight zone caused by the raging war between the nations, or between West and East egg. Another symbol of the Valley of Ashes is the moral decay hidden by the outer beauty of the Eggs, and conveys that beneath the embellishment of West Egg and the older fashion charm of East Egg lies the same immorality as in the valley. The valley is created by industrial carelessness and is a sorrowful result of capitalism. It is the setting to the only poor characters in the novel. …show more content…

J. Eckleburg’s cynical and divine, glass covered eyes staring upon from the billboard, like the Lord Himself judging each and every soul, makes the eyes troubling to the reader. In this passage, Fitzgerald maintains their mystery, giving the eyes no certain symbolic meaning. The eyes are simply unreadable, “brood on over the solemn dumping ground.” Perhaps the most reasonable reading of the eyes in this point of time is that they represent the eyes of the Lord, staring down at the moral decay of the 1920s.

The moral decay, he observes the seven deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. The lust of Myrtle's affair with Tom, the gluttony of drunk driving, the greed of the Eggs, the sloth of solving these immoralities with the Lord, the wrath of George unto to innocent Gatsby, the envy of George ”When he (George) saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes.”, and simply the most noticeable; pride. The Eggs always competing in an attempt to show superiority against each

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