Study Questions
1. What is the Valley of Ashes literally?

2. Who or what is Dr. T. J. Eckleburg?

3. What is George Wilson’s occupation?

4. What items does Myrtle purchase in the city?

5. What is significant about Myrtle’s questioning whether the dog is a boy or girl?

6. Who is Catherine?

7. What effect does the change of dress have on Myrtle?

8. How does Myrtle talk about the help at the hotel?

9. What rumor has Catherine heard about Gatsby?

10. How does Catherine explain to Nick the affair of Myrtle and Tom?

Answers
1. It is an area, something like an isthmus, joining West Egg and East Egg. It parallels a railroad track.

2. The picture of Dr. Eckleburg, an oculist in a bygone age, appears on a billboard in the Valley of Ashes.

3. Wilson pumps gas and repairs cars.

4. She purchases Town Tattle magazine, cold cream, perfume, and a puppy. She has another list to buy the next day: “a massage and a wave, and a collar for the dog, and one of those cute little ash-trays where you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk bow for mother’s grave that’ll last all summer.”

5. She cannot acknowledge the sex of the dog—it is too delicate an issue—but she herself is involved in an illicit sexual relationship.

6. Catherine is Myrtle’s sister procured as a companion for Nick. She may be a prostitute since she “lived with a girl friend at a hotel.”

7. She is transformed as vitality changes to “impressive hauteur.”

8. She refers to them as an inferior order; she has changed roles as she has changed clothes.

9. He is a nephew or cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm’s.

10. According to Catherine, Daisy is Catholic and refuses to give Tom a divorce.