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affluence, the nouveau riche. A
short distance away is New York,
teeming with dubious deals and
clandestine pleasures. In between
lies a patch of terrain where the
bleakness underlying the glamour
is depressingly apparent: the
“valley of ashes.” This desolate
region recalls T. S. Eliot’s Modernistpoem The Waste Land, whose
title refers to the ancient myth of a
kingdom blighted by a curse. It is
here that Tom’s mistress, Myrtle
Wilson, lives with her sad, passive,
garage-owning husband, near
a giant billboard advertising an
optician’s business. The glasses on
the sign are ironic, since nobody is
clear sighted in Gatsby’s world—
not even Nick, who thinks of
himself as “inclined to reserve
all judgements” but in fact feels
superior to everyone, including his
cynical girlfriend, a professional
golfer named Jordan Baker.Color and time
Jordan and Daisy are first seen in
white dresses, but neither is as
innocent as this choice of color
might suggest. Color in The Great
Gatsby is symbolic of the book’s
themes: Gatsby wears a pink suit
and drives a yellow Rolls-Royce—THE GREAT GATSBY
hues denoting his desperate need
to make an impression. One of the
book’s most prevalent symbols is
green, the color of the light at the
end of Daisy’s mooring dock, which
Gatsby gazes at yearningly from
across the water. In the final pages,
alone in Gatsby’s empty garden,
Nick has a vision of the “fresh,
green breast of the new world,”
glimpsed by the first settlers to
reach Long Island; he then muses
on Gatsby’s belief in that symbolic
“green light, the orgastic future
that year by year recedes before
us.” It is here, in the green light
and the green land, that the novel’s
concerns with individual and
national destiny converge.
At the end of the book, feeling
that the East is haunted after the
book’s final tragedy and “distorted
beyond my eyes’ powers of
correction,” Nick returns to his
Midwestern home. In his shifting,Geography of The Great Gatsby
New York City is
the playground of
easy money and
easy pleasure.West Egg
symbolizes false
glamour, built on
enterprise and
new money.The valley of
ashes is a
wasteland, linked
with adultery,
ugliness, poverty,
and death.East Egg
symbolizes
traditional values,
founded on
bloodlines and
old money.I was within and without,
simultaneously enchanted and
repelled by the inexhaustible
variety of life.
The Great GatsbyUS_228-233_Gatsby.indd 232 08/10/2015 13:08