Depiction of the Valley of the Ashes in Chapter 2 of Great Gatsby

Fitzgeralds depiction of the vale of Ashes in Chapter Two The Valley of Ashes, a landfill site solely for changees, is painted by Fitzgerald to greaten our appreciation of American Society and the themes it generates such as social decline, moral ambiguity, the hurt of hope and faith and the dominance of shallow materialism. Nick Carraway labels the Valley as desolate, thus steering our attention into mavin which will perceive the Valley negatively. Fitzgerald then paints the Valley of Ashes as a crude distortion of nature. The references to nature stem from a farm where ashes grow like wheat, among hills and gardens of ash. The ashes give a seeness to the wheat and are the foundation of all life in this area. Consequently they are seen as a symbol of fertility. A problem with this foundation is that ashes from industrial cinders are hardly a fertile symbol yet they support an entire residential area. This is waste and a pollutant, which miraculously gives way to wheat. The wheat (the home of a Western diet) having sprouted from the ash must in any case be corrupted. Therefore the crumbling men would also be corrupted, who live off the land, along with their dreams and ambitions. This is a very bleak brain on life and promises little success to the average American.

akin all themes throughout Great Gatsby, this is a microcosm of America (as the appellation not chosen of the book would suggest: Under the Red, fresh and Blue) so Fitzgerald questions the validity of the American Dream too. Fitzgerald has chosen ash to be the basis because ash is the waste of the rich and industrious. Fitzgerald questions the faith of the rich by suggesting that their extravagant materialistic hunger perverted the ideals of those less well-off; leading by bad example. Marx (a young thinker when the book as written) called agriculture basis for an economy, which questions if the exploitation of wheat from ash is corruption of American society from the eliminate down or bottom up. This... If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay

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