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What section of T. S. Eliot's "Wasteland" resembles an aspect of The Great Gatsby?
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T. S. Eliot's "Wasteland" is a literal wasteland, a desert-like place where nothing grows; the ashes and dust in the area between West Egg and New York City are also symbolic of a place where nothing grows, as that area does not have any colorful, vibrant parts like Manhattan or Long Island.
In the first section of "The Waste Land," the narrator describes a desolate place—a dry, dusty, desert-like land where nothing grows:
"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
In the second chapter of The Great Gatsby, the narrator, Nick, describes the area between West Egg and New York City:
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, describes the area between West Egg and New York City:
"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 grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight."
This area between West Egg and the city is grey, barren, nearly forgotten, and bookended by bustling Manhattan and moneyed Long Island. It has a dry desert quality similar to the waste land, because it is covered in ash and dust from surrounding factories. In this literal sense, the two areas are alike. Symbolically, as well, the valley of ashes is similar to the waste land because it is a deadened place, a place in limbo, a place that that has none of the vibrance of the two areas it connects, where people are merely shadows blending into the dusty landscape. Both locations have a hopeless and flat quality.
Almost every commentator who discusses the influence of T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby argues that the poem definitely influenced the passage from the novel describing
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 grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.
Few commentators, however, point to precise resemblances between this passage and the poem. Rather, they comment more generally on the way this sterile, grim landscape symbolizes the same kind of sterile, depressing environment depicted in Eliot’s poem. Clearly the “valley of ashes” is almost literally a “waste land” of the sort depicted more symbolically in Eliot’s poem.
Among the phrases in the poem that resemble this passage in the novel are the references to the “dead land” (2), “stony rubbish” (20), “a handful of dust” (30), “the brown land” (175), “Rock and no water and the sandy road” (332), “mountains of rock without water” (334), “feet . . . in the sand” (337), “dry sterile thunder without rain” (342), “dry grass” (355), “no water” (359), and “empty cisterns and exhausted wells” (385).
Eliot’s poem contains no explicit references to “ash” or “ashes” or even to a “valley.” The resemblance between the poem and the passage in the novel, then, is not precise but is instead suggestive and general. Eliot had presented a poem in which people and places seemed symbolically dead, and Fitzgerald (who enormously admired Eliot) had tried to do something similar when he depicted the valley of ashes.