Fitzgerald includes a personal account of the troubles of life in The Valley Of Ashes in the characters of George and Myrtle Wilson. On one hand George struggles with existance as a mechanic, picking up scraps of business whenever they come by in order to preserve his wife and himself as the vitality is slowly ebbing away from him. Myrtle has taken a slightly different route and instead does indeed posess a zest and vitality that her character opposite - Daisy - does not. Unlike Daisy, she has a distinctly sexual air about her; she "carries her flesh sensually", the "nerves of her body .. continually smouldering" and proceeds to wet her lips before ordering her husband to fetch some chairs for her guests. However, she too is taken up with the quest for wealth and constantly aspires to be one of the rich whom she so admires. She strives to be as Daisy, changing three or four times in one night to give an air of sophistication and wealth which has eluded her - even in marriage, when she was disappointed to find out her husband was indeed not as gentlemanly as he claimed to be. It is quite sad to think that none of these women have attained the true American Dream: Daisy is rich and yet is not happy, lacking a spark and instead living a relatively extinguished existance while Myrtle posesses these features, yet is struggling with money and aspiring to be amongst the others of West Egg. Ironically, it is that which Myrtle wishes to be that eventually kills her. This could be perceived as a symbol of what would befall Myrtle if she did eventually acquire wealth - she would be destroyed as equally as she was when the car struck her. By choosing to include a focus upon some inhabitants of The Valley, Fitzgerald has invited me to think about people in such situations today and to apply the same message.
However, there is a hint of hope within the book which dimly flickers within the boundaries of realisation and action.
"But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleberg."
The faceless, bespecled eyes of T.J. Eckleberg and the fading, wasting billboard is a mirror placed up to the state of the American Dream. The original spirituality of the Dream in hailing a new, classless and equal society has been transformed into an empty show of consumerism and materialism - a dream which still continues to decline, symbolised by the billboard's continuing deterioration as time passes. The eyes themselves, due to the board's placement in The Valley Of Ashes, can perhaps be seen as looking over the true, rightful recipents of the fading Dream; the colours blue and yellow perhaps representing some kind of ailing hope for the future. Through the very inclusion of this billboard, Fitzgerald has provoked a large amount of speculation as to what it means. By including a symbol of hope such as this, Fitzgerald again has enabled me to draw modern parallels and to take note the many voices which call for drastic change, commenting with a rightfully pessimistic edge that today's society is drifting towards something quite dark and that something needs to be done.
As shown in the book with the aspirations of Myrtle, those who do not have large amounts of wealth will inevitably want to live the life of the rich and the successful. It seems that everyone is affected by this bug as they attempt to inject glamour into their lives by buying designer goods, eating in designer restaurants and getting the all important £500 designer haircut. However, it is not the fact that these people who want the rich lifestyle do these things to attain it, but the ease by which the desire spreads.
"I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life."
In the novel, all of the main characters are originally from the Western side of America, past the Appalachians and amongst the midwestern plains and the northern states. The West coast, in the novel, represents those who have not yet been tainted by the unquenching desire for wealth which has been inflicted upon those in the East coast. Yet merely by going there, all of the once morally and spiritually driven Westerners have been turned to the life of hedonistic decadence and the pursuit of wealth. This again made me think of a modern parallel which, upon further thought, impacted upon me greatly. One could replace the East with the country of America, a place obsessed with the 'winner takes all' philsophy and immersed in materialistic gain, and the West with the United Kingdom. Throughout the years, the UK has become more and more American - perhaps we shall follow them into this also?
Through reading this novel and applying modern parallels, it is clear that Fitzgerald's messages put foward in The Great Gatsby are chronologically universal. Apply them to any time in history and you shall see the importance and relevance of the themes in the novel and it is this ability to take the message from the 1920s and place it into our current time that has impacted upon me to the greatest degree.