The first and most prominent set of eyes are those of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, huge and depicted on a billboard in the valley of ashes. The author writes, “ They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose” (26). These eyes serve as the pinnacle eyes of God, a feature within every piece of notable American literature throughout history. The eyes lack a face, accentuating the ethereal nature of the idea of God, and the size makes him larger than life. His foreboding grandness contradicts the dry purgatory of the valley of ashes, bringing up the imagery of the world being a fallen one. The strangest feature on the eyes, the yellow spectacles, mimic the color of joy and wealth. Just as spectacles distort the sight of a person, wealth can be seen as distorting the view of God, the embodiment of morality. In essence, it shows the convolution of ethics in the quest for economic prosperity.
At one point in the novel, the eyes of T. J. Eckleburg are explicitly mentioned as being the eyes of God. After the death of Myrtle Wilson, George Wilson stutters out a story to Michaelis about an argument he had with her. He had shown her the eyes of Eckleburg while rambling about God seeing what she had been doing (cheating on him.) Michaelis notices his insanity and
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When introducing himself to Dan Cody, he chooses the name Jay Gatsby. This name sounds similar to Cody’s in syllable count and elegance. The author wrote, “The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself” (105). Jay Gatsby, all along, was an idea more than a real person. It was a figment which latched itself on the goal of riches and Daisy Buchanan, and when the latter of those two components was whisked away, Gatsby was fated to die. It was a cruel foreshadowing of the insubstantiality of