了不起的盖茨比 论文

OUTLINE Abstract

Key Words

I. Introduction

II. Background

2.1 Life Experience

2.2 Social Reality

III. Use of Symbolism

3.1 The Symbolism of Name

3.1.1 Daisy

3.1.2 Gatsby

3.1.3 Tom

3.2 The Symbolism l of Setting

3.2.1 East Egg and West Egg

3.2.2 The Valley of Ashes

3.3.3The Eyes of Dr.T,J,Eckleburg

3.3 The Symbolism of Color

3.3.1 Green-Hope, Dream, Envy

3.3.2 Blue-Quiet Melancholy, Fantasy

3.3.3 Yellow (Golden) - Fame, Fortune,Fall

3.3.4 White-Purity, Indifference, Empty

3.3.5 Grey-Desolation Ruins Desperation Ⅳ. Conclusion

Bibliography

中文标题、摘要、关键词

On the Function of the Symbolism in Expressing Theme

of The Great Gatsby

Author：xierongfeng Number：××× Tutor：liuguoying

Abstract: F. Scott Fitzgerald, American novelist and short story writer, is widely consider the literary spokesman of the “jazz age”-the decade of the 1920s .In 1925, Fitzgerald published his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby .In this book, he employs all kinds of names, settings and colors as symbols to reflect the characteristics of the age and to deepen the theme of the work. The author of the paper mainly analyzes the function of the symbolism in manifesting the theme- disillusion of American dream-of the work from there aspects of the symbols-name, setting and color.

Key Words: Symbolism; American dream; The Great Gatsby

Ⅰ.Introduction

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in a not rich family, so he wanted to earn lots of money to become rich to enjoy high quality life. To satisfy his wife’s limitless requirements, he lived a very hard life. The tempo of his life slackened as his

life was shredded by Zelda’s insanity and his own self-destructive alcoholism. Through years of emotional and physical collapse he struggled to repair his life

by writing for Hollywood-producing at the same time a series of stories that exposed his humiliation there. He became one of the greatest writers in American literature and wrote many works in his lifetime to manifest the life reality of that time. He was a spokesman for the so-called Jazz Age, setting a personal as well as literary example for a generation whose first commandment was: Do what you will. He fell from favor as a writer when the indulgent decade of his triumph went down under the impact of a worldwide Depression

in the 1930s.

The Great Gatsby is regarded as his masterpiece. First published on April 10, 1925, the story is set in Long Island's North Shore and New York City during the summer of 1922. The novel tells of Gatsby ,an idealist , who tries to recapture his lost love but in vain and is finally destroyed by the influence of the wealthy people around him .The

story deals symbolically with the failure of the American dream as personified in the rich and beautiful woman Daisy who belongs to corrupt society .The Great Gatsby evokes a haunting mood of a glamorous, wild time that seemingly will never come again. It is about the loss of an ideal and the disillusionment that comes with the failure embodied fully in the personal tragedy of a young man (Gatsby) whose “incorruptible dream”is “smashed into pieces by the relentless reality”. Gatsby’s failure to realize his ideal symbolizes the disillusionment of the American Dream. Also, Gatsby’s intensity of dream represents a state of commitment takes him in search of his personal grail; Gatsby’s failure magnifies to a great extent the end of the American Dream. However, the affirmation of hope and expectation is self-asserted in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s artistic manipulation of the central symbol in the novel, the green light,

II. Background

2.1 Life Experience

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 into a St,Paul middle-class family . After

an unsuccessful undergraduate career at Princeton, he entered the Army as a second Lieutenant and while in training camp he met the beautiful girl who was

to become his wife, He married Zelda Sayre as his literary career got off to a meteoric start in 1920. Through the 1920s when money seemed plentiful and postwar morality encouraged a reckless pursuit of happiness, he and Zelda traveled in Europe and New York, acting out the glamorous life-style he wrote

of in his most popular magazine fiction. He was a spokesman for the so-called Jazz Age, setting a personal as well as literary example for a generation whose

first commandment was: Do what you will. The speed of his life slackened as

his life was shredded by Zelda’s insanity and his own self-destructive alcoholism. He fell from favor as a writer when the indulgent decade of his triumph went down under the impact of a worldwide Depression in the 1930s. Through years of emotional and physical collapse he struggled to repair his life

by writing for Hollywood-producing at the same time a series of stories that exposed his humiliation there.

2.2 Social Reality

The writer lived in the 1920s which is called the Jazz Age in American literature.

Following the shock and chaos of World War I, American society enjoyed unprecedented levels of prosperity during the "roaring" 1920s as the economy soared. At the same time, Prohibition, the ban on the sale and manufacture of alcohol mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment, made millionaires out of bootleggers and led to an increase in organized crime. Although Fitzgerald, like Nick Carraway in his novel, idolized the riches and glamour of the age, he was uncomfortable with the unrestrained materialism and lack of morality that went with it.

The American Dream is the faith held by many in the United States of America that though hard work, courage, and determination one can achieve a better life for oneself, usually through financial prosperity. These were values held by many early European settlers, and have been passed on to subsequent generations. Nowadays the American Dream has led to an emphasis on material wealth as a measure of success and/or happiness. American Dream also refers to the dream of material success, in which one, regardless of social status, acquires wealth and gains success by working hard and good luck. The novel is remarkable for its evocation of an atmosphere of conflict and paradox. The party is crowded and yet empty. The night is beautiful but garish. The scene not only epitomizes the Jazz Age, its superficiality and tawdriness and its equally powerful sweetness and charm, but also represents the author’s major theme: the disillusion of American Dream,

III. Use of Symbolism

Symbol means an act, a person, a thing, or a spectacle that stands for something else, usually something else palpable than that the named symbol. The relationship between the symbol and its referent is not often one of simple equivalence with. Allegorical symbols usually express a neater equivalence with what they stand for than the symbol found in modern realistic fiction. The term symbolism refers to the use of symbol, or to a set of related symbols; however it is also the name given to an important movement in later 19th-century and early 20th-century poetry: for this sense, see Symbolists. One of the important features of Romanticism and succeeding phase of Western literature was a much more pronounced reliance upon enigmatic symbolism in both poetry and prose fiction, sometimes involving obscure private codes of meaning, as in the poetry of Blake and Yeats. In the novel -The Great Gatsby, the writer has used many kinds of symbols, such as the symbolism of name, setting and color to manifest the theme of the novel and reflect the social reality of that time.

3.1 The Symbolism of Name

In the novel, the author uses symbolism skillfully, characterizing the roles, deepening the theme and reflecting the characteristics of the times. We are talking about most is the sound and color of the symbolic significance, and often overlooked symbolic meaning of symbolic name in the novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald treated the naming of the characters in the novel can be described as Originality. We all have a certain extent generated a fixed views on the habit of

name, and the names of the characters in "The Great Gatsby” have the intention to help shape the characters, deepen the theme of the novel, to guide readers to understand the deeper level of the ideological content of the novel.

3.1.1 Gatsby

Gatsby is the most important character of this novel. In order to win his beloved woman-Daisy back, he engages himself in bootlegging and other “shabby” activities, thus earning enough money to buy a magnificent imitation French villa. There he spreads dazzling parties every weekend in hope of alluring the Buchanan’s to come. They finally come and Gatsby meets Daisy again, only to find that the woman before him is not quite the ideal love of his dreams. Finally he was dead in innocently. His death is the product of carelessness and chance. Nick imagines it: I have an idea that Gatsby didn’t believe himself that it [the phone call from Daisy] would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old worm world, paid a high price for living so long with a dingle dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like the ashen ,fantastic gliding toward him though the amorphous trees.( Fitzgerald,2005,168) In the novel. Fitzgerald both recreated “the American Dream”, the dream of innocent, pastoral American

Created by man’s capacity for wonder, and also sees it as a nostalgic desire for that which time itself defeats, As Gatsby is an artistic surrogate, chasing with his “creative passion”a symbol that is both transcendent and corrupted, The Great Gatsby is a symbolist tragedy.

3.1.2 Daisy