Valley of ashes practice essay

In the book, “The Great Gatsby”, written by F.Scott Fitzgerald, the Valley of the Ashes helps the reader better understand the idea of the failure of the American dream through the valley of the ashes. The valley of ashes is the area of New York where the city’s ashes is dumped. A glum place, described by Nick as “a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens”. When Nick describes the area to have “ridges and hills”, it paints a picture that the there is a lot of ashes, a lot of people being let down by the dream, and the amount is forever growing, as shown by “fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat”, and the line “with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air” shows that people are run down, tired, and fairly hopeless, only being pushed on by this faint hope, a hope, perhaps, only based on a distant dream obscured and distorted by the constant “impenetrable cloud” that they themselves create, maybe because the dream is the only thing they have that keeps them going. The American is that everybody should have equal opportunity, as long as they work hard for it. However, the valley of Ashes shows that this is not happening, that this is not true. This is shown by the fact that the people living there are working hard everyday, and they are still there, the dream failing more and more people day by day, and then there are people like Tom and Daisy, who have never worked a day in their lives and are extremely wealthy.

 

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