Examples Of Imagery In The Great Gatsby

Imagery in the setting
The Great Gatsby has a lot of numerous settings throughout the story, some have the grandeur and luxury of Gatsby's existence, when others tell the plain reality for the average man.
On their way to New York City, Nick Caraway and Tom Buchanan travel through a grim place filled with impoverished and defeated working men and women. Notice how Fitzgerald describes the 'valley of ashes' helps you see the place and also feel how honestly gloomy it is.
'This is a valley of ashes, a extraordinary place 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

Wilson was a blonde, spiritless man, bland but faintly handsome. From this description, you get the sense that Wilson is a lackluster kind of guy like someone who's been beaten down by life.
On the other hand, Fitzgerald describes Wilson's wife Myrtle in a way that makes her pop from the page: ‘She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face...contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smoldering.' It would be much easier for Fitzgerald to describe Myrtle as slightly overweight and having an unattractive face, but the imagery would be far less meaningful to whoever is reading it.
Characters in the novel are created with bright imagery. While at a party at Gatsby's, Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker encounter a peculiar man in a library: 'A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books.' Later in the story, the character appears again as 'Owl Eyes'. You can imagine how closely he resembles a bird.
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