What Does West Egg Symbolize In The Great Gatsby

In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses symbolism in order to advance the plot, as well as enhance the quality of the novel. A symbol is a character, an object, or figure that is used to represent a theme or concept in a novel. In The Great Gatsby, the reader follows the life of Nick Carraway, and the people he meets in Long, Island New York. The story displays a man named Jay Gatsby, who lives across the road from Nick, and Gatsby’s fervent love for Nick’s cousin Daisy Buchanan. Overall, Fitzgerald deftly uses many symbols in The Great Gatsby, including the valley of ashes and East and West Egg, the billboard with Doctor Eckleburg’s eyes on it, and Daisy to represent corruption in order to advance the plot, and advance the quality

The story takes place in Long Island, New York, and “Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of saltwater in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals…”(Fitzgerald 7).These two “eggs” each represent a different class of people: West Egg contains new wealth and East Egg contains old wealth. Characters who have rich roots, like Daisy and Tom Buchanan, as well as Jordan Baker, live in East Egg, and people with newer wealth that tend to flaunt their wealth with extravagant parties, like Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway, live in West Egg. Nick Carraway, the narrator describes the West Egg, where he lives as “the less fashionable of the two..” (7). The two eggs symbolize how the characters are different due to where they live, and they look at others differently due to their living situation. Between the two “eggs” lies the valley of ashes, which Nick first views on a trip with Tom to see Tom’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson. The road

Fitzgerald first introduces the billboard in chapter two of the novel. The billboard stands over the Valley of Ashes, and the eyes of Doctor T.J Eckleburg stare down from the billboard. Fitzgerald describes the importance of the billboard by stating“The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose” (26). The billboard and the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg symbolize that someone is always watching over the characters in the novel. When Nick goes with Tom across the Valley of Ashes and first sees the billboard, Tom is sneaking around with his mistress Myrtle. While Tom thinks he is being sneaky, the eyes on the billboard are watching him. The eyes on the billboard also symbolize that God is watching over the characters in the novel. The billboard continues to appear throughout the story and watches over the characters. When Wilson found out about Myrtle cheating on him, he spoke to her and “... said ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me but you can’t fool God!’” (170). Also, before Wilson kills Gatsby, he speaks to his friend Michaelis, and Michaelis sees “that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg which had just emerged pale and