“Gatsby turned out okay in the end,” muses narrator Nick Carraway in the opening pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald's timeless novel The Great Gatsby. “It is what preyed on Gatsby, the disgusting dust that floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed my interest in the abortive pains and breathless elations of men.” The destructive dust that plagues Gatsby permeates the lives of every character who passes through the Valley of Ashes, a desolate wasteland nestled between the nouveau riche West Egg and the bustling metropolis of New York City. This consuming dust makes everyone extraordinarily miserable and dissatisfied; it clouds even the brightest moment with a pervasive darkness. Although the Valley of Ashes lacks the charm of East Egg and the lively evenings of West Egg, Fitzgerald uses his opening description of the place to emphasize its significance. His somber word selection, melancholy tone, and evocative use of figurative language poignantly reflect for the reader the underlying desolation and desperation that characterizes the author's commentary on the social structure of the early 1920s. Fitzgerald infuses his description of the Valley of Ashes with a plethora of words that evoke the desolation and misery of the valley. Everything about it is “desolate,” “grotesque,” ​​“dilapidated,” “dark,” “solemn,” “dirty,” and “grey” (Fitzgerald 23-24). The grayness alone is ironically spectacular, because Fitzgerald's work is defined by the use of brilliant colors, from Daisy's virginal white to Gatsby's luxurious gold. That he characterizes the valley with such subtle, achromatic nuance betrays the desperation that underlies Fitzgerald's novel. While the characters themselves are saturated in bright, ghostly hues, the world… at the center of the card… enhances his perception of the novel as a whole. political prosperity. It was an era characterized by frivolous luxury and rampant excess, by the quest to realize the American dream. Surely success could be bought and sold; surely a void of the spirit could be filled at the right price. As Americans sought fulfillment in the material, F. Scott Fitzgerald recognized that their loneliness remained, an unyielding gray dust that plagued even the wealthiest, an emotional void that could not be filled by any measure of wealth. The Valley of Ashes, Fitzgerald's symbolic characterization of this spiritual poverty, persists as a poignant reminder of the ultimate uselessness of money and as the graveyard of the American dream. Works Cited Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 2004.