Hayley’s Blog

This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.

1. Fitzgerald’s use of describing the city as ashes shows that it is a place that is unwanted with unwanted people. Ashes represent the dreams of those who’ve fallen and came to rest together in one community. They tried to suceed the american dream of traveling to the city and making a name for themselves and they failed. The town of ashes represents the nightmare of the dream.

3. Gray is associated with depression, saddness, boredom and thats the exact description that Fitzgerald wishes to display. The people are even grey everything just oozes a terrible aura.

“It’s just a crazy old thing,” she said. “I just slip it on sometimes when I don’t care what I look like.”

1. When Myrtle mentions her dress as a careless object you can see her desperation to be someone better then she is. Socially she wants to improve and appear to be better off, part of the dream is that money is not a object to worry about. It’s all about trying to establish a higher social class for ones self.

Charecter development: Myrtle is the perfect stereotype of trying to put on a mask to appear as someone else. She tries so desperately hard to crawl out of the hole she is in and doesn’t come to the realization that it is nearly impossible to break through the walls of society. Gatsby makes it seem so easy.