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In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald the desolate and yet whimsical expressions are amplified by the authors rich detail and character. The reader is shown to the valley of the ashes and narrator Nick Carroway s lasting perception of the valley is portrayed. A clinical and detached account is expected from such an observer, in contrast what is received is tainted with fancy. The author s diction augments life among the ashes. The ash-gray men crumbling through the powdery air live in this valley of the ashes.
The inhabitants of this valley have become reminiscent shells of their former selves, and the fragile shells easily disintegrate into empty and elapsed lives. The people of this dismal place have been as drained and used as their environment. The motor road hastily joins the rail road as to shrink away from the oppressive ashes easily stirred into an impenetrable cloud. The segment of the road passing through the valley is so alien and distasteful Nick perceives even the road cowering for comfort. Those traveling past it are made uncomfortable by the unfamiliar scenes. The people riding the train gaze out of the valley as but an eyesore, but for those living among the ashes they are burnt out like the landscape.
Fitzgerald heightens the passage by assigning calculated detail about the region and it denizens. The men swarm up with leaden spades in a communal effort to save a car that gave out a ghastly creak in this desolate area of land. Every aspect is exaggerated or decreased, the men are slightly less than human and the noise even more wretched. Even the cars are gray and impoverished and are burning out, though there owners still plod onward. Ashes grow like wheat and take the form of houses and chimneys, next to where grotesque gardens grow. The animation of the ash illustrates the constant pervasion of it.
As used and strained the area is there is still an unquenchable life underneath the impervious ash. The ash encompasses the people and the land but it does not entirely strangulate them. The first person point of view induces the reader to travel along with Nick traveling down the railroad track and gazing out the window at the ashen valley in the dry summer heat. The portrayal is pure narration, Nick is entranced by the fantastic farm where everything from the rising smoke to the ash-gray men appear to be made out of ash. The description is not a sterile account but is contaminated not by Nick s emotions but by his imagination. While travelling in the valley he takes it all in, not as life, but as an exhibition of a foreign spectacle.
In the later part of the passage the focus shifts to the men who move dimly and the line of gray cars trudging along upon an invisible track. The portrait is still whimsical about the sober, alien district. The description conjures the emotion of the reader but it does not transmit any emotion from Nick. The reader is left with a persisting perception of a surreal world. In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald the monochromatic world, is really a symbol of an exhausted land and an exhausted people of a an industrial society.
Literary scholars claim that Fitzgerald the inspiration and the term for the valley of ashes were coined from T. S. Elliot s poem The Waste Land. The valley of ashes was an ulcer adulterating a beautiful landscape.
It was a different world for the pampered and affluent who lived without the force of ashes, of burnt out lives on their shoulders.
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Research essay sample on F Scott Fitzgerald Valley Of Ashes
