soz I accidentally slept on my map of the settings and it got all ripped up and I lost it in my bed oops 🙁
- but I got some quotes 🙂
Valley of Ashes-
- ABOUT half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a 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.
- The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.
West egg-
- I lived at West Egg, the well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. my house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. the one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard it was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. it was Gatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires all for eighty dollars a month.
Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas−pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life.
East Egg-
- Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago. And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red−and−white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun−dials and brick walks and burning gardens finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.
New York City-
- Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my shadow westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York to the Probity Trust. I knew the other clerks and young bond−salesmen by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I even had a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting department, but her brother began throwing mean looks in my direction, so when she went on her vacation in July I let it blow quietly away.
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I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove.
the four setting in the great Gatsby are:
- West egg- Gatsby’s house and Nick’s house
- Easy egg- Daisy’s house
- valley of ashes- Wilson’s garage, Michaelis restaurant, and the sign with the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg
- New York city- the offices where people work, the apartment Tom rented for Myrtle Wilson, and the plaza hotel.
in the Great Gatsby the four main settings we are introduced to already show the false reality of the supposed American Dream as the towns/cities are very clearly designed for specific classes of people.
people who live in East Egg are those born in to wealth, whose families have always had money and being rich is all they know. They are considered more snobby, greedy and mean than those of West Egg. The people of East Egg have usually never had to work for their money and have always had it so they are innocent and clueless with very basic lives. The Buchanans are the only family we know of who live in East Egg, where Tom was born into a very wealthy family and Daisy who also came from a wealthy family married Tom for his large quantities of money. They are a typical East Egg family where their lives revolve around their money and status and no not associate themselves with any other people who aren’t upper class like them.
West Egg on the other hand is considered less fashionable and people who are new to wealth live there. Most of the people in West Egg have morals to live off and their lives don’t all revolve around money as they experience the real world and are genuinely more down to earth and friendly. Nick had recently moved to West Egg so he could go to work in New York City. He is a genuine, polite guy who holds his own dignity and does not base his life around how much money he has or makes. Gatsby on the other hand fits into the new to wealth part as his way to the upper class was a shady path and the residents of west egg and east egg did not really accept him as ‘one of them’ as he was not born into upper class and no-one knows how he made it to upper class. His money is new and he doesn’t have the social status to be accepted into East egg.
The Valley of Ashes on the other hand is where all of the poor people live, those who are the victims of the rich. The Valley of Ashes doesn’t really have anything going for it, as it is described as a wasteland with nothing going on and is literally characterised as dust. People who live in the Valley of Ashes have the dream of working hard enough to eventually move out and to move to a new place with prosperity and success as the American Dream states but in reality they are stuck there their whole lives. It is a depressing industrial area where the locals work constantly in hope of a better life as the rich just feed and live off the work they do. Myrtle and George Wilson are a classic example of poor people looking to work hard to get out of the Valley of Ashes but their not really getting anywhere with their dream of success.
New York is a symbol of what America has become in the 1920’s and it is the bustling city which is shown as a city where anything can happen there and anyone can be who they want to be. It is the chaotic city where money is made and bootleggers make their riches. By the characters it is also seemed to be thought as some sort of temporary escape momentarily where the main characters can live alternate lives once in a while or escape the reality they live in. In truth I believe that New York city is a place where they escape to temporarily experience what they would consider some sort of American dream replica where it seems like the city of opportunity and endless possibilities.
All of these four settings each display a false reality about the American dream. The residents of East Egg have never had to work for their lifestyle whereas the residents living in the Valley of Ashes have worked every day in their life for very little reward. Those in West egg have either made their way to riches by illegal actions such as bootlegging or as they call it ‘new money’ so aren’t born into the riches as far as those from East Egg can see.