The Great Gatsby - Eden Imagery :: essays research papers

In the big Gatsby, each character is longing for champion particular paradise. Only one character actually reaches utopia, and the arrival is a mixed bless(prenominal)ing at best. The concept of paradise in The Great Gatsby is a shifting, fleeting invocation of happiness, joy, love, and perfection, a mirage that leads each character to reach deeper, look harder, strive farther. thither is myrtle Wilsons gaudy, flashy hotel paradise in which she can take a leak that she is glamorous, elite, wanted and loved. She clings fiercely enough to this ragged dream to brave the pure anger of Tom Buchanan by voicing her jealous terror that he will return to his wife. in that location is a desperation to her full, spirited dah of living, she wants so much to escape the grey, dead land of the Valley of Ashes that she influence her bearing with any brightness she can find, be it broken looking glass or diamonds. Nick describes land she finds herself in as a wasteland, a desert, saying &q uotthis is the Valley of Ashes -- a fantastic farm where ashes grow standardised wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a a priori effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery send out" (page 29). It is from this that myrtle is trying to escape, this life-in-death valley that characterises the underbelly of New Yorks glitter and lights and finery, and this that she is dragged hind end to by the dawning jealous rage of a normally preceding(a) husband. To run away from the grey and the death, the colourful, brimming woman runs out, arms outstretched, to the automobile she thinks belongs to the man who promised to take her away from the Valley. But -- she began in shadows and in shadows she dies, "her life violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick, dark blood with the dust" (page 144). There is an "ashes to ashes dust to dust" element to every action in the novel, and Myrtle is no exception. We as readers focus more on Daisy and Tom, Gatsby and Nick Myrtles fall is telling the same story as Gatsbys, as Daisys. In the end, her life is worth no more and no less than the great millionaire in his mansion on West Egg. Daisy and Tom be bereft of these dreams.