The Valley of Ashes of The Great Gatsby is East and West Egg’s luxury opposite. It is sterile, barren wasteland in between city and suburb, swept out by industrial ash and soot. But it’s not simply somewhere: it is the symbol of social and moral decay of America in 1920s. Valley of Ashes is a metaphor for the lost class: working and poor ones weighed down by greed and wealth. Gatsby’s throwing of his lavish parties and the Buchanans reaping advantage of being born with it, like George and Myrtle Wilson, their existence lives in the ash. Their existence is desolate and dirty with drudgery and desperation. It’s a physical symbol that not everyone can achieve the American Dream. This desert also predicts how much consumerism and unashamed capitalism is going to cost. Those in power accumulate their wealth, but on the backs of the valley people are they accumulating it. The ash itself industrial waste is warning us what it does when society will do anything for money. Over this desert the Dr. T.J. Eckleburg’s eyes, a worn-out billboard resembling a god looking down upon moral decay. It commands a universe in which there is a failure of former values, and no one watches over justice or truth. Through the use of the Valley of Ashes to characterize, Fitzgerald shows people the flip side of things below the surface of the Jazz Age. It’s the price of the dream and the people who pay it.