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论文 美国梦的幻灭 别:硕士专业:英语语言文学 指导教师:李美华 20090401 摘要 摘要 弗·司各特·菲茨杰拉德是二十世纪美国最伟大的作家之一。
他的作品使他成了20年代“爵士时代’’的发言人。
那时美国正经历一个特殊的年代:经济飞速发展,生活方式发生巨变,而与此同时传统道德却逐渐土崩瓦解。
l 1925年出版的《了不起的盖茨比》被认为是菲茨杰拉德最伟大的作品,也被誉为最出色的反映20年代“美国梦”破灭的美国小说。
“美国梦”这个词第一次是出现在詹姆斯·特拉斯洛-亚当斯所写的《美国的史诗》一书中。
美国被描述成一片每个人都能捐j有新的平等机会的梦幻之地。
美国梦是一个被众多美国人普遍信仰的信念:在美国只要经过努力和不懈的奋斗,每个人均有机会获得更好的生活。
美国梦的宗旨原是指对道德价值和幸福的追求,但这种追求很快就变成了对财富的追求,最后演变成了贪婪。
20年代享乐主义开始大行其道,“美国梦”最终破灭了。
在《了不起的盖茨比》中,菲茨杰拉德描绘了爵士时代的众生相。
在这个时代,爵士乐流行;“轻佻女郎”重新定义了现代女性;新发明新发现层出不穷;工业飞速发展;人们的消费欲望猛增。
这也是一个与传统决裂,与现代紧密相连的时代,现代技术似乎使任何东西都唾手可得。
《了不起的盖茨比》描述了一个名叫盖茨比的人的故事。
他想找回他的初恋情人黛茜,并重建他们理想的爱情。
盖茨比与黛茜在一战前曾热恋,但因盖茨比家境清寒,黛茜就嫁给富家子弟汤姆·布坎农。
盖茨比因为没钱而失去了黛茜,但他仍然还爱着她,所以他竭尽全力想要重新赢得黛茜。
在他靠非法买卖发了横财后,他开始实施他的“计划”——买回黛茜的爱情。
他天真地以为:有了金钱就能重温旧梦,赎回失去的爱情。
但是,他错了。
因为他所爱的女人一一黛茜是现代社会腐化的产物。
一天,黛茜因情绪激动,开着盖茨比的车子在归途中将汤姆的情妇玛特尔撞死了。
在盖茨比成功帮黛茜逃脱罪责并被汤姆的情妇玛特尔的丈夫误杀后,他的美国梦彻底破灭了。
菲茨杰拉德在小说中探究了金钱与爱情的关系。
盖茨比努力地追求他的 The Disillusion of the American Dream“美国梦”,他错误地相信金钱可以让他买到爱情和幸福,所以他竭尽一生去追求财富。
他以为财富可以让他赢回黛茜。
但最终金钱没给他带来任何好处,他的梦想也彻底破灭了。
《了不起的盖茨比》是一部“美国梦”的编年史。
盖茨比为了追求黛茜耗尽了自己的感情和才智,最后葬送掉自己的生命。
小说通过盖茨比的爱情与财富幻想的破灭,揭示了社会道德的沦丧与美国梦的幻灭。
l关键词:菲茨杰拉德;盖茨比;美国梦;幻灭 Abstract Abstract Francis Scott Fitzgerald is widely regarded as one of the great Amrican writers inthe twentieth century.His works are evocative of the Jazz Age during which timeAmerica had been experiencing an economic boom and significant changes in lifestyle,but the moral values started seeing a steady decline at the salne time. The Great Gatsby,published in 1 925,is widely considered to be F.ScottFitzergerald’S greatest novel.It is also considered a seminal work on the fallibility ofthe American Dream.The term”American Dream”Was first used by James TruslowAdams in his book The Epic ofAmerica.America Was described as Dream of Land a awith new opportunities and equal chances for everyone.The American Dream is thefirmly held belief that everyone has the opportunity to achieve their goals and becomerich and prosperous if they only work hard enough.The original idea of the AmericanDream is about moral values and the pursuit of happiness.But the pursuit of happinessWas soon turned into the pursuit of wealth and ultimately to greed.In the 1 920s,theAmerican Dream Was nothing but an idea of materialistic wealth and objectivepleasures. The Great Gatsby presents realistic image of the American life in the 1 920s.Inthis period,jazz music blossomed,the flapper redefined modern womanhood.The eraWas further distinguished by several inventions and discoveries of far-reachingimportance,unprecedented industrial growth and accelerated consumer demand andaspirations.The Roaring Twenties Was marked by a general feeling of discontinuityassociated with modemity,a break with traditions.Everything seemed to be feasiblethrough modern technology. The novel is about an unsuccessful love stoW of a man named Gatsby who tries towin back his wartime lover一-Daisy and recreate his idolized version of their affair.Gatsby and Daisy has a brief love affair before World War I.However’Daisy marriesTom Buchanan,a rich but boring man of social position.Gatsby loses Daisy becausehe has no money,but he is still in love with her.So he tries everything to get Daisyback.He makes a lot of money with illegal business and begins to implement his plans,step by step,to”buy”Daisy’s love.Assuming that he Call buy Daisy’s love by The Disillusion of the American Dreamexhibiting his wealth,Gatsby becomes committed into using his money to impressDaisy.Though Gatsby makes a great effort for his American Dream,in the end hisdream fails completely since the woman he loves is a corrupt product of modemsociety.One day,Daisy,driving Gatsby’S car,hits and kills Tom’S mistress,MyrtleWilson.When Gatsby helps Daisy to escape from the accident successfully and ismistakenly murdered by the husband of Tom’S mistress,his American Dream is broken.There is nothing left to him after his death,his wealth no longer means anything,andDaisy does not come back to him,either. Fitzgerald explored the theme of love in relation to money in the novel.Gatsbymakes a great effort for his dream.He erroneously believes that money Can buy himlove and happiness.So he lives his whole life in pursuit of wealth and power.Gatsbybelieves he Can win Daisy back by the possessions he owns.But he obtains nothingfrom his money and his dream is totally lost. The Great Gatsby is a chronicle of the failure of the American Dream.The riseand fall of Jay Gatsby parallels the rise and fall of the American Dream.The authorcompares the theme of American dream with Gatsby’s dream of getting Daisy back.When Gatsby ultimately loses his dream,the American Dream finally becomes adisillusion.Key Words:Fitzgerald;Gatsby;the American Dream;disillusion 厦门大学学位
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夕年乡月,2日 Introduction Introd uction Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald(1 896—1 940)is an American writer of novels andshort stories,whose works ale evocative of the Jazz Age,a term he coined himself.Heis widely regarded as one of the great writers in the twentieth century.Fitzgerald isconsidered a member of the”Lost Generation”.He finished four novels,left a fifthunfinished,and wrote dozens of short stories that treat themes of youth and promisealong with despair and age. Born on Cathedral Hill in St.Paul,Minnesota,to an upper-middle class IrishCatholic household.His first literary effort was published in a school newspaper whenhe was 1 3.He attended Newman School,a prep school in Hackensack,New Jersey,in191 1—1912,and entered Princeton University in 1913 as a member of the Class of191 7.There he became friends with future critics and writers Edmund Wilson(Classof 1 9 1 6)and John Peale Bishop(Class of 1 9 1 7),and wrote for the Princeton TriangleClub.As a mediocre student throughout his three years at Princeton,Fitzgerald severedhis relationship with the university in 1 9 1 7 to enlist in the United States Army,whenAmerica entered World War I.The War ended shortly after Fitzgerald’S enlistment.Fitzgerald wrote a novel titled The Romantic Egoist,portions of which later largelywere reincarnated as the first half of This Side ofParadise. While at Camp Sheridan,Fitzgerald met Zelda Fitzgerald(1 900-1 948),the”topgirl”,in Fitzgerald’S words.The two were engaged in 1 9 1 9.But working at anadvertising firm and writing short stories,Fitzgerald Was still unable to convince Zeldathat he would be able to support her,leading her to break off the engagement. Fitzgerald returned to his parents’house in St.Paul to revise The Romantic Egoist.Recast as This Side of Paradise about the post删1 flapper generation,it Wasaccepted by Scribner’S in the fall of 1 9 1 9,and Zelda and Scott resumed theirengagement.The novel was published on March 26,1 920,and became one of the mostpopular books of the year. Although he reportedly found movie work degrading,Fitzgerald was once againin dire financial straits,and,like Hemingway,spent the second half of the 1 930s inHollywood,working on commercial short stories and his fifth and final novel,The The Disillusion of the American DreamLove of the Last Tycoon.Published posthumously as the Last Tycoon,it was based onthe life of film executive Irving Thalberg.From 1 939 until his death,Fitzgeraldmocked himself as a Hollywood hack through the character of Pat Hobby in asequence of 1 7 short stories,later collected as The Pat Hobby Stories. F.Scott Fitzgerald was a writer very much of his own time.As Malcolm Cowleyonce put it,he lived in a room full of clocks and calendars.The years ticked awaywhile he noted the songs,the shows,the books,the quarterbacks.His own careerfollowed the pattern of the nation,booming in the early 1 920s and skidding into nearoblivion during the depths of the Depression.Yet his fiction did more than merelyreport on his times,or on himself as a prototypical representative,for Fitzgerald hadthe gift of double vision.Like Walt Whitman or his own Nick Carraway,he wassimultaneously within and without,at once immersed in his times and able to viewthem and himself with striking objectivity.This rare ability,along with his rhetoricalbrilliance,has established Fitzgerald as one of the major novelists and story writers ofthe twentieth century.It was characteristic of Fitzgerald,who Was one of the mostautobiographical of writers,to transform his own experience into fiction.Fitzgeraldadhered to the Renaissance and Romantic conception of the writer as a man of actionwho experiences his material at first hand一一not from lack of imagination,but he canwrite about it more intensely. Fitzgerald has always been the poet of the American upper bourgeoisie;he hasbeen the only writer able to invest their lives with茸amor.Yet he has never been surethat he owed his loyalty to the class about which he was writing.It is as if he had adouble personality.Part of him is a guest at the ball given by the people in the bighouse;part of him has been a little boy peeping in through the window and beingthrilled by the music and the beautifully dressed women-··-a romantic but hard·-headedlittle boy who stops every once in a while to wonder how much it all cost and wherethe money came from.Cowley says that this dual perspective works well inFitzgerald’S earlier books. Th/s side ofParadise is Fitzgerald’S first novel,a classic ofAmerican literature.ItWas published in 1 920.In 1 922,he published his second novel,The Beautifu,andDamned.With the publication of his masterpiece The Great Gatsby in 1 925,Fitzgeraldreached the peak of his writing career.In 1 93 3,on the verge of his”emotional 2 Introductionbankruptcy”,Fitzgerald staked a great deal on Tender Is the Night.In the last year ofhis life,Fitzgerald stole time from his screen writing and stories to begin The LastTycoon(1 94 1),an unfinished novel of great promise. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories.Some of the stories are brilliant,somevery moving such as”The Rich Boy’’and”Babylon Revisited”.His most popularcollection of short stories is All the Sad Young Men(1 926).And another one-一Flappers and Philosophers issued shortly after the publication of his first novel,thiscollection of short stories contains many of his most famous,including”111e IcePalace”,”Bemice Bobs Her Hair”,and”The Off-Shore Pirate”.There are others:Talesofthe Jazz Age(1922),Taps at Reveille(1935)and Pat Hobby Stories(1940). While he WaS still in his teens,Fitzgerald wrote four plays that were produced bya local theatre group in St.Paul.The names of the plays are:The Girlfrom Lazy Z TheCaptured Shadow,Coward and Assorted Spirits.They are mostly romantic adventures.After that,Fitzgerald wrote more plays:Fie!Fie!Fi-Fi(1914).The Evtt Eye(1915).Safty First(1916).The Vegetable(1922),Three Comrades(1938)and BabylonRevisited《1940)。
The Great Gatsby,published in 1 925,is widely considered to be F.ScottFitzergerald’S greatest novel.It is also considered a seminal work on the fallibility ofthe American dream.Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby in France,where he and hiswife and daughter were to spend most of the last half of the 1 920s.The novel bearsalmost no resemblance in form to those that had come before.The setting of The GreatGatsby is New York City and Long Island during the 1 920s.Nick Carraway,thenarrator,works as a bond broker in Manhattan.He becomes involved in the life of hisneighbor at Long Island,Jay Gatsby,shady and mysterious financier,who isentertaining hundreds of guests at lavish parties.Gatsby reveals to Nick,that he andNick’S cousin Daisy Fay Buchanan,had a brief affair before the war.However,Daisymarried Tom Buchanan,a rich but boring man of social position.Gatsby lost Daisybecause he had no money,but he is still in love with her.He persuades Nick to bringhim and Daisy together again.”You Can’t repeat the past”(Fitzergerald,1 992:68),Nicksays to him.Gatsby tries to convince Daisy to leave Tom,who,in turn,reveals thatGatsby haS made his money from bootlegging.One day,Daisy,driving Gatsby’s car,hits and kills Tom’S mistress,Myrtle Wilson,unaware of her identity.Gatsby remains 3 The Disillusion of the American Dream silent to protect Daisy.Tom tells Myrtle’S husband it was Gatsby who killed his wife.Wilson murders Gatsby and then commits suicide.Nick is left to arrange Gatsby’s funeral,attended only by Gatsby’S father and one former guest. The Great Gatsby has inspired probably as much critical commentary as any othertwentieth-century American novel.Although some reviewers thought that it Was”abook of the season only”(Paterson,1 925:6),most reviewers agreed with Fitzgerald thatthere Was something”extraordinary and beautiful and simple+intricatelypatterned”(Bruccoli and Duggan.1 980:1 1 2)about his novel.William Rose Ben6t’Sreview summarized the extraordinary qualities:”The Great Gatsby reveals thoroughlymatured craftsmanship.It has structure.It has high occasions of felicitous,almostmagic,phrase.And most Of all,it is out of the mirage.For the first time Fitzgeraldsurveys the Babylonian captivity of this era unbinded by the bright lights”(Ben6t, 1 925:740).Almost every reviewer,like Benrt,noted Fitzgerald’S new moralperspective and skilled craftsmanship.Had Fitzgerald not matured in his attitudetoward his material,his technique would have failed;had he not developed an”aesthetic ideal”,his theme would have been obscured.Actually,Fitzgerald achievedSO rare a balance among the many demanding requirements of fiction that,as one criticsaid,The Great Gatsby”is an almost perfectly fulfilled intention”(Paterson,1 925:6).Itis SO intricately patterned and tightly knit,SO beautifully integrated through a series ofparallels,that it hardly seems possible that criticism will exhaust the novel.If Th/s S磁eofParadise resembles the novel of saturation,where everything is included,The GreatGatsby epitomizes the novel of selection,where every detail fits and nothing issuperfluous. Fitzgerald’S doubleness of perspective enabled him to identify with Gatsby andhis dreams and yet to stand back with Nick Can’away and see how ridiculous thisself-styled”young rajah”was.Part of him was romantic,forever seeking theuncapturable ideal.Part Was realistic,aware of the rot festering beneath the glitteringsurface.And linked with this double vision of himself and his times was a remarkableverbal gift which cannot be adequately described,only quoted.The closing words ofThe Great Gatsby work thematically to tie his modern tale to its historical background,but they stay in the mind not for that reason at all but because of their powerfulrhetorical appeal.Nick has been reflecting on how Long Island must have struck Dutch 4 Introductionsailors’eyes three hundred years earlier:as a fresh,green breast of the new world. Fitzgerald’S The Great Gatsby Was not a great Success during his lifetime,butbecame a smash hit after his death,especially after World War II.It has since become astaple of the canon of American literature,and is taught at many high schools anduniversities across the country and the world.Four films,an opera,and a play havebeen made from the text.Gatsby offers a detailed social picture of the stresses of anadvanced capitalist culture in the early 1 920s,it simultaneously encodes its Americanexperience,at key structural moments,within the mitigating precepts of a mysticWestern dualism.Fitzgerald glamorizes the nouveaux riches of that period to a certainextent in his Jazz Age novel.He describes their beautiful clothing and lavish partieswith great attention to detail and wonderful use of color.However,the author wasuncomfortable with the excesses of that period,and his novel sounds many warningnotes against excessive love ofmoney and material success. Critics have generally agreed that The Great Gatsby is the crowning achievementof Fitzgerald’S literary career.It evokes not only the ambiance of the jazz—age searchfor the American Dream of wealth and happiness,but also the larger questions offading traditional values in the face of increasing materialism and cynicism.F.ScottFitzgerald provides a social commentary on the 1 920s in this novel.The Great Gatsbyis an important American novel and not just a mere historical document depicting lifein the 1 920s.Like other writers of the 1 920s,Fitzgerald was fascinated by thespectacle of what had become of the American Dream and how it had becomecorrupted by greed and materialistic possessions. The 1 920s proved the most influential decade of Fitzgerald’S development.Hemade several excursions to Europe,notably Paris and the French Riviera,and becamefriends with many members of the American expatriate community in Paris,notablyHemingway.Hemingway looked up to Fitzgerald as an experienced professionalwriter.Hemingway greatly admired The Great Gatsby and wrote in his A MoveableFeast,”If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I Was sure that he couldwrite all even better one”(Hemingway,1 996:1 53).Hemingway expressed his deepadmiration for Fitzgerald,and Fitzgerald’S flawed,self-defeating character,when heprefaced his chapters conceming Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast with: The Disillusion of the American Dream His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.(Hemingway, 1996:129) Much of what Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast helped to establish themyth of Fitzgerald’S dissipation and loss(of ability,social control,and life)and Zelda’Shand in that demise.Though the bulk of Hemingway’s text is factually correct,it isalso colored by his disappointment in Fitzgerald,as well as Hemingway’s ownrivalrous response towards any competitor,living or dead.That disappointment wasmost evident in The Green Hills ofAfrica,where he specifically mentions Fitzgerald asan archetypal mined American writer;Hemingway had been both shocked andunnerved by Fitzgerald’S account of his own difficulties in his nonfiction essays andnotebooks from the 1 930s,published as砌P Crack-Up(with Edmund Wilson as editor)in 1945. F.Scott Fitzgerald’S classic fictions are accepted as documents of American socialhistory by readers all over the world in every printed language.The Great Gatsby isread as a record of American life at a certain time and place.Much of the force ofFitzgerald’S fiction results from his delicate sense of time and place and from hisability to evoke them.Y:et his fiction is peppered with errors of geography,errors ofchronology,errors of arithmetic,and inconsistencies.John 0’Hara was overgenerous increditing Fitzgerald with the qualities of his own fiction:”E Scott Fitzgerald was aright writer...111e people were right,the talk was right,the clothes,the cars werereal…”(O’Hara,1941:3 11). Criticism of The Great Gatsby,when it has not been sidetracked into biography orreminiscence of the Jazz Age,has tended to concentrate on two issues.The first ofthese has been concemed with the moral seriousness of the book,with what answer,ifany,can be giVeil to the hostile critic of John Farelly,writing in Scrutiny,is a goodexample: 1 want to suggest that there is an emptiness in his work that makes convincing analysis 6 Introduction honestly difficult,but leaves a hollow space where critics can create their own substitute.And I should probe for that hollow space in what we call the centre of a writer’s work—that around which and wim reference to which he organizes his experiences;in short,his values.(Harvey,1 957:1 6) Fitzgerald’S reputation for ignorance and carelessness has fostered two perniciouseditorial-critical positions.The first of these is that since he did not strive for factualaccur/acy,the correctness of his texts does not matter.He knew very little about cars:the most famous vehicle in American fiction,Gatsby’s car,is not identified.Fitzgerald’S reputation as the historiographer of the Twenties is distorted.He was asocial novelist whose work became social history,but he was not a documentary orreportorial realist.The second position一一which compounds error-一is that editors arefree to alter anything in Fitzgerald’S work that seems problematical.Thus whenEdmund Wilson edited The Great Gatsby in 1 94 1 he emended the celebrated line”Gatsby believed in the green light,the orgastic future,that year by year recedes beforeUS.”He subsequently explained:”The word orgastic,on the last page I took to beScott’S mistake for orgiastic6 he Was very unreliable about ......