Symbolism In The Great Gatsby

In the novel, The Great Gatsby,F. Scott Fitzgerald, shows the hardship of the roaring 20’s and america's new found obsession with wealth. We meet Gatsby who has been in love with Daisy since he met her five years ago, he attains a new lifestyle in order to be able to take her away from her husband, but sadly he never achieves that. The story is narrated by Nick, who is ultimately Gatsby true and only friend in the novel. Fitzgerald highlights the idea of the american dream in his novel, the great gatsby, we can see the way Fitzgerald depicts the american dream by using multiple symbols to exemplify the false reality of the american dream.

The symbol of the valley of ashes is used to illustrate the false sense of hope in the american dream.

Fitzgerald uses myrtle as an example, “A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity--except his wife, who moved close to Tom. ” Fitzgerald describes Wilson being covered in the ashes and also the other people in the valley with the same thing. What the ashes represents is that everyone in this area, are covered with hard work that’s going to waste, they’re covered in hopelessness. We can see that Myrtle isn't covered in the ashes because she was one of the people trying to get out of the valley of ashes, to get to the american dream, and she leans towards tom and has an affair with him to prove her motives to escape this lifestyle and be apart of Toms word, but she never ended up escaping the valley since she dies. She was seeking a life that she was never going to get. She also ironically dies in the valley showing us that she was apart of the valley, she seeked for a better life, but ended up never getting it and dying where she began. Another character Fitzgerald uses in the novel to exemplify the american dream failing is Gatsby himself. Gatsby grew up poor with two parents that worked in farming, most of his life he never accepted that fate, once he was older, he started working for his lavishing lifestyle even though it was in a corrupt way. “Look here, this is a book he had when he as boy, it just shows us” (173). Inside the book was ways that Gatsby was trying to be apart of the higher class. When gatsby’s father says “it just shows”, it implies that even though you can put in years of hard work to be apart of the american dream, it just shows how no one will ever truly achieve