Great Gatsby Valley of Ashes Quotes

I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her gray sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1, Nick eyes Jordan Baker, a professional golfer of some fame. We see his immediate physical attraction to her so it comes as no surprise that he becomes romantically involved. But in keeping with the valley of ashes theme, Jordan’s gray eyes suggest something hidden about this woman who cheats at golf and also bends the truth.

This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 2. The valley of ashes symbolizes the moral and social decay resulting from the unhindered pursuit of wealth. It is where the rich indulge themselves in the total pursuit of their own pleasure. It represents absolute poverty, hopelessness and spiritual and moral barrenness – a place of gray desolation.

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 2. While riding on the train to the city with Tom, Nick tells us that Tom uses the train stop to meet up with his mistress Myrtle Wilson for a night filled with drunkenness and violence. The ‘ashes’ description symbolizes the valley’s moral depravity and social decline.

‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. 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.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1. In the valley of ashes, there is a thick veil of gray dust that makes it look as if everything is made out of it. Especially George Wilson, who is wears his sadness and desolation like a gray suit. His wife Myrtle is having an affair with Tom Buchanan.

He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 8. Nick imagines what Gatsby must have been feeling when George Wilson shot him as he lay on an air mattress in his pool. He tries to imagine what it was like for Gatsby to have lost his dream – the American Dream and Daisy who was a major part of it. The symbolism of the flower suggests that Gatsby felt disillusioned with Daisy and she was not a worthy object of his worship. The ‘ashen’ figure is George Wilson, the character most closely associated with the Valley of Ashes.
Close