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.
- What is the connotation of a farm? How is it ironic here?
- What is the simile in the second sentence? Why does Fitzgerald use this comparison?
- What is the effect of polysyndeton? (repetition of the conjunction)
- How are the “men” portrayed? Why?
- What color predominates this paragraph? Why?
- What is Fitzgerald implying by the use of the verb 'swarm”?
