George Wilson is a hard working man trying to run his own business who can't get ahead because he is treated as a piece of trash by people like Tom Buchanan. Tom jerks him around and pretends to have a car to sell him so that he can have an excuse to come to and to telephone the garage—all so that he can make arrangements to sleep with George's wife. George might as well be part of ashes he lives near for all the humanity Tom assigns him.
People like George can't get out of the Valley of Ashes because men like Tom, with inherited wealth on their side, manipulate them. Tom not only sleeps with Myrtle under George's nose but he is able to manipulate George into killing Gatsby by convincing him that Gatsby was the one who ran over Myrtle.
The deck is stacked against men like George, who don't realize that the American Dream is not meant for people like them.
George Wilson is the perfect symbol for the downside of the American Dream. He runs a fairly unsuccessful garage in the Valley of Ashes, a place whose residents seem to be unable to get on in life, who only live there because they have no place else to go. George certainly can't keep his wife, Myrtle, in a style to which she wants to become accustomed, hence her affair with Tom Buchanan, which provides her with an entree into a world of wealth, glamour and opulence, one far removed from the general air of boredom and hopelessness in the Valley of Ashes.
Amid all the wild parties, the glamorous fashions and ostentatious displays of wealth, it's important to bear in mind when reading The Great Gatsby that far more Americans in the 1920s lived like George Wilson than Gatsby, Tom, or Daisy Buchanan. George and his neighborhood, the Valley of Ashes, represent the forgotten men and women of the American Dream in the Roaring Twenties –– ordinary, decent, hard-working people, generally anonymous and chronically unable to escape from a life of toil and thwarted ambition.
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