The Ash Heaps of Willets Point in The Chosen and the Beautiful: Symbol Analysis

What the Ash Heaps Are, Literally and SymbolicallynThe ash heaps of Willets Point are a recurring landscape in Nghi Vo's The Chosen and the Beautiful: a stretch of industrial waste ground between West Egg and New York City, dominated by the billboard of T. J. Eckleburg. In the novel, they function as a literal dumping ground where the city's refuse accumulates in what Jordan Baker describes as tall ash palaces whose towers and wings are always drifting away. The ash is pervasive and physical: it clings to Jordan's hands, hair, feet, and even her belly, and it smudges the white sheets of her bed when she returns home. The landscape is a place of death, haunting, and reckoning, and its meaning shifts across the novel as Jordan moves through it at different moments of crisis.nn## A Landscape of Waste and ForgettingnnThe ash heaps represent the underside of the Jazz Age prosperity that the novel's wealthy characters inhabit. Jordan's revelation while wandering through the ash palaces is explicit: this is where New York goes when it is tired, when it is done. The ash heaps are what remains after the glittering parties, the expensive cars, and the careless lives of the rich have consumed and discarded their materials. The novel connects this waste to the broader social order—the same system that produces Gatsby's wealth and Daisy's beauty also produces the ash heaps, and the two are inseparable. This connects directly to the theme of the corrosive power of wealth and class privilege: the rich can discard people and places and never look back, but the ash heaps remain, holding the evidence.nnThe ash also functions as a kind of residue of history. When Jordan walks through the ash palaces under the influence of demoniac, she sees visions of the past—her own childhood in Tonkin, Nick's grandmother in Milwaukee—projected by the stars. The ash heaps become a place where buried histories surface, where the things that the wealthy have tried to forget (immigration, exclusion acts, family secrets) refuse to stay buried. This connects to the theme of memory, trauma, and the haunting past.nn## The Eckleburg Billboard: Eyes That Refuse to SeennThe billboard of T. J. Eckleburg is the most striking feature of the ash heaps. In the novel, the eyes are not the wide, wise eyes of the original Gatsby mythology; they are closed. When Jordan, Nick, and Tom pass the billboard on the night of Myrtle's death, Jordan notes that the eyes are closed and refuse to look any further. The billboard's refusal to see is significant—it suggests that the forces that might witness or judge the violence of the wealthy are themselves blind, or have chosen to look away.nnJordan's response to the billboard's silence is one of the novel's most important scenes. Drunk on demoniac, she climbs the billboard and cuts a mouth into the paper with a shard of glass, demanding that the eyes speak. The billboard tells her what it saw: a car, too fast; a woman who needed to leave, going flying; the car stopping; and then eyes. The eyes that the billboard saw belong to Daisy, who was driving the car that killed Myrtle—a fact that Jordan has been circling all night. The billboard's testimony is brief, and then the paper peels away entirely, revealing an older advertisement for the Bonney Brothers' Traveling Circus. The revelation suggests that even the billboard itself is a kind of surface, a paper-thin construction that can be peeled back to reveal something older and stranger beneath. The eyes close again, and the billboard says it will sleep and see no more.nn## Death and HauntingnnThe ash heaps are the site of Myrtle Wilson's death. In Chapter Nineteen, Jordan, Nick, and Tom arrive at the scene where Myrtle's body lies on a workbench in George Wilson's garage, her red hair visible, her bare feet tied together with string. The scene is rendered with brutal specificity: the neighbors' commentary about her copper shoes with silk bows, Tom's frantic insistence that the car was a loan, and his weeping on the drive back to East Egg. Tom Buchanan is exposed here as a coward, and Nick Carraway reveals a callousness that Jordan later discovers is part of his paper construction.nnThe ash heaps remain a haunted place. In Chapter Twenty-Three, after Gatsby's death and funeral, Jordan stops at Willets Point on her way out of the city. Myrtle's ghost rises from the ditch beside the road—her pale face perfect, her hair gleaming like a stoplight, her small feet bare. Jordan gives the ghost a twenty-dollar bill and directs her to Barcelona, where Daisy and Tom are headed. The gesture is both practical and strange: Jordan is trying to give the dead woman an exit, a way out of the ash heaps that have claimed her. This scene connects to the theme of displacement, immigration, and the search for belonging, as Jordan is herself preparing to leave the city.nn## A Threshold Between WorldsnnThe ash heaps function as a threshold space in the novel—a place where the boundaries between the living and the dead, the real and the magical, become permeable. Jordan's night walk through the ash palaces is filled with visions: men with the heads of pigs and dogs (a Circe reference), a Black man with a trumpet case who tells her that New York's ghosts are a discerning lot who wouldn't stay in the ash, and the stars themselves, which project moving pictures across the darkness. The ash heaps are also a place of departure. Khai and Bai are leaving for Shanghai because of the Manchester Act, and Jordan considers joining them. When she finally leaves the city, she stops at Willets Point one last time, encounters Myrtle's ghost, and then drives on toward the city, where she buys embroidery scissors and has a vision of Gatsby's house decaying, burning, and being replaced by new buildings under foreign stars. The ash heaps mark the edge of the world she is leaving behind.nn## Character ConnectionsnnJordan Baker is the character most intimately connected to the ash heaps. She is the one who wanders through them, who forces the billboard to speak, who encounters Myrtle's ghost. The ash clings to her—literally, physically—and she carries it back to her apartment, where it smudges her white sheets. The ash heaps are where Jordan confronts the truths that the wealthy have tried to bury: Daisy Buchanan's guilt in Myrtle's death, the fragility of Nick's identity, the impermanence of Jay Gatsby's world. The ash heaps are also where Jordan's own identity as a constructed performance becomes most visible, connecting to the theme of identity as a constructed and fragile performance.nn## Theme ConnectionsnnBeyond the themes already noted, the ash heaps connect to gender, sexuality, and bodily autonomy through Myrtle's body—displayed, discussed, and commodified even in death, with the neighbors commenting on the cost of her shoes. The ash heaps are where the novel's critique of wealth, violence, and forgetting converges, and where Jordan begins to imagine a way out.nn## Study Questionsnn**1. Why does Jordan cut a mouth into the Eckleburg billboard, and what does the billboard's testimony reveal?nnJordan cuts a mouth into the billboard because she is frustrated with its silence—she demands that the eyes speak, that they bear witness to what happened. The billboard's testimony reveals that it saw a car, a woman who needed to leave, and then eyes—Daisy's eyes. The scene is significant because it shows Jordan using her paper magic for herself, not for Daisy, and because it forces the landscape to speak the truth that the wealthy characters have been trying to suppress.nn2. How does the ash heaps' meaning change over the course of the novel?nnInitially, the ash heaps appear as a grim backdrop to Myrtle's death—a place of waste and violence. In Chapter Twenty, Jordan's night walk transforms them into a magical, liminal space where visions surface and the billboard speaks. By Chapter Twenty-Three, the ash heaps have become a site of departure and haunting, where Jordan encounters Myrtle's ghost and begins her own journey out of the city. The meaning shifts from a place of death to a place of reckoning to a place of leave-taking.nn3. What does the ash that clings to Jordan represent?nnThe ash that clings to Jordan's hands, hair, feet, and belly—and that smudges her white sheets—represents the residue of the world she has been moving through. It is the physical trace of the violence and waste that the wealthy try to ignore. Jordan carries the ash with her because she is the one who has seen the truth: she has witnessed Myrtle's death, forced the billboard to speak, and learned the secrets of Nick's paper identity. The ash marks her as someone who cannot remain innocent of what she has seen.nn4. Why does Jordan give Myrtle's ghost a twenty-dollar bill and direct her to Barcelona?**nnJordan gives Myrtle's ghost money and directions because she is trying to give the dead woman an exit—a way out of the ash heaps where she has been trapped. The gesture is practical (the money will get her started) and symbolic: Jordan is refusing to let Myrtle remain a permanent ghost of the waste ground. The scene also connects to Jordan's own departure—she is leaving the city, and she wants Myrtle to have the same chance to leave.