Colorless Gray

"Occasionally a line of gray 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."

The Great Gatsby, Ch 2. 

          Fitzgerald uses multiple colors in his text to express his ideas. In the quote above, gray is implicitly used as a color of no hope or no vast changes in the future. The "ash-grey men" are of a low hard-working class that are constantly living in a dull and ash bound environment. The way in which the men "immediately" began working is Fitzgerald's way of telling the reader that these men have been repitetively working on the same job. These men are stuck here for generations because nothing good will ever happen in a valley of darkness, or the valley of gray. Just as the "impenetrable cloud" hides the the workers. The Valley of Ashes is ignored by the wealthy in West Egg. It takes part of their fictional world as unreal or inexistent. Since no one that can make a difference acknowledges the society hidden in the valley of Ashes, gray then represents no success. Failure is permanently surrounding them in clouds of ash.