The Suffocating Valley of Ashes

While reading The Great Gatsby, one passage really stood out to me. It was the description of the so called Valley of Ashes and its inhabitants. Nick's viewpoint and vivid description stuck in my mind. The passage begins on page 23, the opening page and note of 2.

"About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. 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.
But above the gray land and spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleberg."

This passage gives a grave description of the Valley of Ashes, a place inhabited by the poor who are described as ashes. The valley of ashes is a filthy, polluted, and tarnished home that will never seem clean and alive; it is a toxic environment and it chokes its inhabitants. The people are described as "dim" and "crumbling". Even the cars are described as "crawling" and "ghastly", depicting the enormous effect of the suffocating cloud of ashes. Everyone and everything are clearly broken beyond repair and are getting eaten alive by the ashes, the effect of commercialism.

But the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleberg rise above everything else, acting as a beacon of hope and a goal to strive for, surviving above all the people and the ashes. These eyes symbolize the fruitless efforts of the people to achieve a goal that will never come true.