The Great Gatsby.
Scott Fitzgerald is a novel that illustrates American Culture in the 1920's. The entire novel is seen and told through the eyes of Nick Carraway. Nick is a young man from the west who decides to journey to New York to try his hands in the stock and bond Market. In New York, he is met with a story of love, lust, murder, cheating, murder, and exploitation, all things he would have never anticipated. Fitzgerald paints a vivid portrait of a land ruined by greed and wastefulness. In the novel the reader is introduced to the "Valley of Ashes." The "Valley of Ashes" is a desolate land created by the dumping of the industrial waste. Fitzgerald uses the " Valley of Ashes" to portray, the corruptiveness of wealth, it leads to a life of materialism and purposeless spending and ends in, the ugliness of the "Valley of Ashes", a symbol of wasted life and wasted land.
The "Valley of Ashe" repreasents the desolation of life. What was once a flowering place has become a wasteland of industry. Fitzgerald depicts life among the ashes as no life at all. The "ash grey men" "crumbling through the powdery air" (30) live in this "Valley of Ashes." The live people that among the ashes have become former zombies of themselves, who are slowly disintergrating and wasting away. The people of this dismal place are as used and drained up as the land surrounding them. Every aspect of the valley is decreased , the people who live amongst the ashes are slightly less human and the land is described as a hell on Earth:.
"Ash grows like wheat" and " take the form of houses and chimneys," next to where, "grotesque gardens" grow. The years of wastefulness and expoitation have brought so much ash, that it looks like they form houses and gardens. The ash and dust has taken a life of it's own and in some aspects smothering the people that live in the valley. But as the used and strained the area and its inhabitants has become there is still life underneath the impervious ash.