Wilson’s glazed eyes turned out to the ashheaps, where small grey clouds took on fantastic shape and scurried here and there in the faint dawn wind.
‘I spoke to her,’ he muttered, after a long silence. ‘I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the window—’ With an effort he got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face pressed against it, ‘—and I said ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me but you can’t fool God!’ ‘
Standing behind him Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg which had just emerged pale and enormous from the dissolving night.
‘God sees everything,’ repeated Wilson.
‘That’s an advertisement,’ Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson stood there a long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight.
By six o’clock Michaelis was worn out and grateful for the sound of a car stopping outside. It was one of the watchers of the night before who had promised to come back so he cooked breakfast for three which he and the other man ate together. Wilson was quieter now and Michaelis went home to sleep; when he awoke four hours and hurried back to the garage Wilson was gone.
(P. 170)
The symbolic significance of T J Eckleburg’s billboard contrasts Wilson’s Delusion like plants in a messy apartment. The duality of godlike serenity and the absolute pettiness of human conflict are inseparable here as Wilson prays to Doctor Eckleburg to lay judgement upon his wife. As a symbol Eckleburg represent the American Dream and its associative properties. Eckleburg’s to himself displays just the man’s eyes and glasses, they are untouchable; there is no way to fight them, you can’t really kill them. The mysterious ambiguity of it, in comparison to the “gray” suburbia entrapping it, subjects it to scrupulous idolization.
The way WIlson views Eckleburg as a God offers incite on the unreachable nature of the American Dream. To Wilson, the American Dream occupies an unparalleled prestige in his mind which hard work can surely be the only way to obtain the success he seeks. The tragedy of Wilson’s delusion of the American Dream is that he is so deeply brainwashed to believe in it, that he cannot conceive that “[It’s] only a commercial” and like a commercial it’s formulated to sell some arbitrary product, like putting cigarette ads at the eyelevel of children. Wilson’s undying commitment to the American Dream is epitomized by his own suicide. The American Dream is likened to a cult in this way, its unmatchable simplistic beauty manipulates the people of the valley of the ashes into a docile proletariat people who allow the super rich, like Gatsby or Tom Buchanan to exist at the absurd plane which they live in. The obligation to materialism is what Fitzgerald helplessly petitions against in the novel, and shows how it unalterably dooms those most susceptible to it’s false beauty.
