What Does The Valley Of Ashes Symbolize In The Great Gatsby

In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald many symbols are used to support the themes and characters. The Valley of Ashes is a symbol that represents death, poverty, moral decay, and the unattainability of the American Dream. It reveals a lot about the themes, such as the gap between the hollow rich and the hopeless poor, and the characters, like Myrtle and George Wilson’s lives and deaths. The Valley of Ashes was a dumping ground between Long Island, or the East and West Eggs, and New York City. Both neighboring places were lively and full of money, but the Valley of Ashes contradicts that description. It housed Myrtle and George Wilson, two characters that led lives in dependent on their surroundings. The Valley of Ashes represented more than an ugly trek to the city, it held a deeper meaning of life, death, and decay. First, the Valley of Ashes represented death through its symbolic description. The Valley of Ashes is a “desolate area of land,” Fitzgerald figuratively describes it as, “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 …show more content…
The Valley of Ashes represents the unattainability of achieving the classic American Dream. The people who want to leave the valley are trapped within their unchanging fates. Myrtle Wilson goes to great lengths escape the Valley of Ashes, but it only results in her death. The Valley of Ashes exists because the new industrialized cities use the area for wasteland, what once was a place that was full of possibilities has been burned out to ashes and lifelessness. The corruption of the valley directly relates to the corruption of the dream. The romanticized American Dream is no longer attainable as the Valley of Ashes