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In a short essay, explain how The Green Light and The Valley of Ashes serve to develop the story's multiple themes. Analyze the development of these symbols over the course of the novel, and describe the resulting effects on the reader's experience. Include specific details from the text to support your answer.

Answer :

The Green Light- posed as Gatsby's hope for daisy's return and her return back to him especially. Always prominent and eventually he gave up on the light. Giving the theme of hope, dreams.

Eyes of JT eckleberg- symbolized gods eyes looking down on everyone over a wasteland (Valley of ashes) and judging. It gives the theme of judgement, society.

Explanation:

In the beginning of the novel, the light stands for Gatsby's dreams, hopes, and desires to reunite with Daisy. Throughout the novel, Gatsby's dream is revealed to be not realized, so the symbolic meaning behind the green light collapses. Slowly it becomes a sign of how he can never get what he wants and dreams for which was Daisy’s love. Nick Carraway, understood the importance of the green light for Gatsby and related the green light with everyone's hopes and dreams. He realizes this when Gatsby “stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Unintentionally I glanced seaward--and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.”

The valley of ashes also develops the story’s other themes of society and class, as well as inequality in the society. It showed the gap between the higher and the lower class, forgotten world of the lower class. Gatsby lives in the West Egg, the area populated by the “new money” and between the 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.” The certain desolate area of land refers to the Valley of Ashes, where people were poor and worked hard to give the people living in the West Egg wealth. Beyond Gatsby’s lavish parties, is a colorless, bleak setting of reality. Everyone in every class is miserable, and the valley of ashes only serves to hide the helplessness and bad condition the rich feel, while clearly representing the despair of the poor. It is a barrier in a sense, where it divides the rich and the poor.

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