What techniques does Fitzgerald use to convey bleakness in the setting of chapter 2?F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald's marvelous use of color imagery finds itself
turned to monotones in Chapter Two of The Great Gatsby as the
description of the Valley of Ashes is in sharp contrast to the verdant lawns and white
curtains and gold of an afternoon reflected in French windows that diminish to the green
light at the end of Daisy's pier. Instead, the area is ashen; railroad cars that bring
the industrial waste from New York are described as a line of "grey cars" that crawl
along and then give "a ghastly creak."

The Valley of ashes
is desolate, a "fantastic farm" where, metaphorically, only ashes grow, taking the forms
of houses and chimeys and "grotesque gardens." Even the inhabitants of this area are
covered with dust and their spirits spent.  George Wilson, who has a "shadow of
a garage" in this desolate area is described as a "spiritless man, anaemic and faintly
handsome" with a "white ashen dust veiled his dark
suit."

At the party in the New York apartment, Fitzgerald
describes the people as shadowy and seen through a blur of
smoke:

The 
little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes through the smoke and from
time to time groaning faintly.  People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go
somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for eath other, found each other a few
feet away.

Throughout Chapter
Two, there is the imagery of greyness and the blind staring of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg with
decadent yellow spectacles that pass over "a nonexistent nose"; also, there is
the metaphoric artificiality of the Fifth Avenue apartment in New York with its gossip
magazines upon the coffee table and Mrs. Wilson's feigned hauteur and laughter ringing
through the room. Certainly, Fitzgerald's magery and metaphor in this chapter convey a
sense of bleakness and decadence.