The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue. They appear on a gigantic, fading billboard overlooking the Valley of Ashes, the bleak industrial wasteland between Long Island and New York City. Nick describes the eyes as blue and enormous, with yellow spectacles and no visible face behind them.
The billboard originally advertised an optometrist’s practice. The business has disappeared, but the painted eyes remain above the landscape, watching over the ash heaps, railway traffic, and George Wilson’s garage. Its abandoned condition mirrors the novel’s interest in faded promises and the decline hidden beneath modern prosperity.
The eyes are often interpreted as a symbol of judgment, God, or an empty substitute for morality. Fitzgerald does not provide one fixed explanation, so their meaning remains open to debate. A frequent mix-up comes from the yellow glasses surrounding the eyes: the glasses are yellow, but the eyes themselves are blue.