《了不起的盖茨比》分析英语专业毕业论文

本科生毕业设计 (论文)

题目：A Contrastive Analysis of the Greatness of Gatsby and the Meanness of His Foils in The Great Gatsby

教学单位外国语学院__ _ ________

姓名 _朱兴春 ________

学号_200730701142___________

年级 2007级 ________

专业英语 _______

指导教师文培红__________________

职称 _副教授_________________

2011年 5 月 14日

Abstract: The scholars have already done some researches on the book The Great Gatsby which was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, such as the writing styles of the author in the book, symbolism and metaphor, the failure of the ―American dream‖, the analysis of the protagonist —Gatsb y—the representative of hero and Daisy‘s and other women‘s selfish and mental emptiness. On the basis of these, it revealed the failure of the ―American Dream‖people had in that times when they paid more attention to the materialistic hedonism but spiritual void by analyzing the characters such as Gatsby, Daisy and Tom. Therefore, Gatsby‘s ―American Dream‖—Daisy—was doomed to failure. However, he was great because he speared no efforts to make his dream come true.

摘要：学者们已经对《了不起的盖茨比》中作者的写作手法——象征及比喻、“美国梦”在现实中的幻灭、盖茨比的人物分析——英雄主义的代表、以及故事中黛西等女性角色空虚自私的生活等分析与评论。因此，在这基础上，通过对盖茨比与黛西、汤姆为代表的上层人物进行逐个分析，从反面揭示出以黛西、汤姆为代表的重商主义者在美国现实社会下对物质的追求与享乐但精神空虚如同行尸走肉般的人们注定了像盖茨比一类人的“美国梦”的破灭。因此，盖茨比的“美国梦”——黛西——注定是失败的，但是他为了实现自己的梦想不断奋斗的精神是了不起的。

Key Word: greatness Gatsby meanness of the foils American Dream 关键词：了不起盖茨比大众的粗恶美国梦

Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………….I

1 Introduction (1)

2 The author‘s experiences and the social background (1)

2.1 The author‘s experiences (1)

2.2 The social background (3)

3 The analysis of Gatsby‘s greatness (4)

3.1. Gatsby‘s courage and persistence (4)

3.2 Gatsby‘s kindness and generosity (6)

3.3 Gatsby‘s sacrifice, filial piety and self-discipline ……. ………. …….. ..6

4 The analysis of Daisy‘s and Tom‘s meanness (7)

4.1 The analysis of Daisy (7)

4.1.1 Daisy‘s beauty and her attractive voice (7)

4.1.2 Daisy‘s apathy, indifferent, and selfish (7)

4.1.3 Dais y‘s desire for material and money, and her empty spirit (8)

4.2 The analysis of Tom (8)

4.2.1 Tom‘s cruel ty and crudity (8)

4.2.2 Tom‘s selfishness and his awareness of his status and possessions..9

5 The description of the follies (9)

6 Conclusion (10)

References (12)

Acknowledgements (13)

1 Introduction

The Great Gatsby is written by American author Francis Scott Fitzgerald, who is considered a member of the ―lost generation‖ of 1920s. It was first published in 1925. The following is the main plot of the novel. A young man named Nick Caraway, who came to New York City in spring of 1922. He became involved in the life of his neighbor at the Long Island, Jay Gatsby, a very rich man, who entertained hundreds, even thousands of guests who did not know each other and Gatsby at his party. Gatsby revealed to Nick, that he fell in love with Nick‘s cousin Daisy before the war. However, he was poor at that time. Therefore, Daisy married Tom Buchanan, a rich but boring man of high social position. When Gatsby came back after the war he found Daisy was married because he had no money but he still loved her. So he wanted to regain Daisy by earning money as a bootlegger. After he was rich, he persuaded Nick to bring him and Daisy together again. Gatsby tried his best to convince Daisy to leave Tom and live with him. Unfortunately, in return, Tom revealed that Gatsby had made his money from bootlegging. So they asked Daisy whom she loved and who she wanted to live with. Daisy had no idea and began to sob helplessly. So she wanted to escape from this situation. Driving Gatsby‘s blue car, she hit and killed Tom‘s mistress, Myrtle Wilson, and she was so crazy that she did not know what she could do. Gatsby remained silent in order to protect her. But Tom told Myrtle‘s husband Wilson that it was Gatsby who killed his wife. Wilson murdered Gatsby and then committed suicide. Tom and Daisy left Long Island in the afternoon when Gatsby was killed and did call neither Nick nor Gatsby. Nick was left to arrange Gatsby‘s funeral, attended only by Gatsby‘s father and one former guest. The Great Gatsby was the reflection of the times which Fitzgerald called ―the Jazz Age‖ and recorded the life people lived in that time.

2 The brief introduction of the author and the social background

Francis Scott Fitzgerald lived in the period that was between the WWI and the roaring twenties. He had his own traditional value which was contradicted to the main value in those years. So he had double and contradictory personality.

2.1 The introduction to the author

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, and named after his ancestor Francis Scott Key, the author of ―The Star-Spangled Banner‖. Fitzgerald was raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. Though an intelligent child, he did poorly in school and

was sent to a New Jersey boarding school in 1911. Despite being a mediocre student there, he managed to enroll at Princeton in 1913. Academic troubles and apathy plagued him throughout his time at college, and he never graduated, instead of being enlisted in the army in 1917, as World War I came to the end. Fitzgerald became a second lieutenant, and was stationed at Camp Sheridan, in Montgomery, Alabama. There he met and fell in love with a wild seventeen-year-old beauty named Zelda Sayre. Zelda finally agreed to marry him, but her overpowering desire for wealth, fun, and leisure led her to delay their wedding until he could prove a success. With the publication of This Side of Paradise in 1920, Fitzgerald became a literary sensation, earning enough money and fame to convince Zelda to marry him. Many of these eve nts from Fitzgerald‘s early life appear ed in his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, published in 1925. Like Fitzgerald, Nick Carraway was a thoughtful young man from Minnesota, educated at an Ivy League school (in Nick‘s case, Yale), who moved to New York after the war. Also similar to Fitzgerald was Jay Gatsby, a sensitive young man who idolized wealth and luxury and who fell in love with a beautiful young woman while stationed at a military camp in the South. Having become a celebrity, Fitzgerald fell into a wild, reckless life-style of parties and decadence, while desperately trying to please Zelda by writing to earn money. Similarly, Gatsby amassed a great deal of wealth at a relatively young age, and devoted himself to acquiring possessions and throwing parties that he believed it would enable him to win Daisy‘s love. As the giddiness of the Roaring Twenties dissolved into the bleakness of the Great Depression, however, Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and Fitzgerald battled alcoholism, which hampered his writing. He published Tender Is the Night in 1934, and sold short stories to The Saturday Evening Post to support his lavish lifestyle. In 1937, he left for Hollywood to write screenplays, and in 1940, while working on his novel The Love of the Last Tycoon, he died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four. Fitzgerald was the most famous chronicler of 1920s America, an era that he dubbed ―the Jazz Age.‖ Written in 1925, The Great Gatsby was one of the greatest literary documents of this period, in which the American economy soared, bringing unprecedented levels of prosperity to the nation. Prohibition, the ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol mandated by the ―Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution‖(1919), made millionaires out of bootleggers, and an underground culture of revelry sprang up. Sprawling private parties managed to elude police notice, and ―speakeasies‖—secret clubs that sold

liquor—thrived. The chaos and violence of World War I left America in a state of shock, and the generation that fought the war turned to wild and extravagant living to compensate. The staid conservatism and timeworn values of the previous decade were turned on their ear, as money, opulence, and exuberance became the order of the day. Like Nick in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald found this new lifestyle seductive and exciting, and, like Gatsby, he had always idolized the very rich. Now he found himself in an era in which unrestrained materialism set the tone of society, particularly in the large cities of the East. Even so, like Nick, Fitzgerald saw through the glitter of the Jazz Age to the moral emptiness and hypocrisy beneath, and part of him longed for this absent moral center. In many ways, The Great Gatsby represented Fitzgerald‘s attempt to confront his conflicting feelings about the Jazz Age. Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald was driven by his love for a woman who symbolized everything he wanted, even as she led him toward everything he despised.

Fitzgerald‘s novels and stories reflected vividly the shattered ―American Dream‖and showed the mental outlook of the high social status men‘s in the ―waste era‖during the Great Depression. He not only had the successful and prosperous life experiences, but also had the bitter and frustrated suffering. So he was called ―the authority of the failure‖. His life was intertwined with ambition and reality, success and failure, proud and down, to revel in and decadent, love and suffer, the conflict between the American culture and Europe culture, between the east and west, between the dreams and disillusionment, etc.. With all these feelings in his heart, he lose his value and direction. So he was also one of the representatives of ―The Lost Generation‖.

2.2 The social background between the WWI and the “Roaring T wenties”

The WWI was ended in 1919 and America was undoubtfully the winner. Since America afforded the munitions to the both sides of the countries at the beginning of the WWI, America got a lot of money and its economy was strengthened which made America become a creditor nation from a debtor nation. After the war, America was in an unprecedented era of economy prosperity and bountiful substance. At the same time, its society was filled with the moral decadence, because justice and faith became the cheating words which defeated the whole generation as the essence of the imperialist war was exposed gradually. Of the ruins of the ancient tradition, faith, and idea, the American youth lived in a deficit spending and pleasure life. Money was regarded as the most important thing in the world. While the traditional value faced

challenge, the new value was not formed. So the people in these years had decadent value and empty life, and they wanted to be millionaires overnight or perused material meet and get-it-while-you-can. ―American Dream‖made all the people‘s eyes dazzling as a colorful balloon wandering in the air. (吴建国，p32)―All the gods have all death ray, all the battle has been finished, all the faith all has completely lost.‖(Fitzgrald,p253) The Jazz Age referred to the ten years from the year of 1919 to the year of 1929, and Fitzgerald described the atmosphere of this period as ―This is a constantly miracles era, a prosperous times, a profligate era, an era of irony.‖(Fitzgerald,p14) in his article of Echoes of the Jazz Age.

Before the WWI, the laissez-faire democratic ideal that America had always believed was the product of an age when individual effort counted, when a man could rise his own efforts, and when if his affairs were not succeeding he could at least escape by signing up for a whaling voyage or lighting out for the territory ahead of the rest. When the system failed, it was the fault of rapscallions and crooks; the version remained an ideal and the standard from which criticism and judgments could be made.

However, WWI shattered this version. It ended once and for all the faith in individual effort that had been eroding since the Revolution and had persisted –sometimes naively and sometimes defensively-in the fiction in this period. As Mark Schorer had pointed out, disillusionment with the American system and the efficacy of individual effort was the distinguishing characteristic of postwar American writing. “The rootlessness of postwar American society, its restless alienation, and its consequent reliance on money were regarded as a code for expressing emotions and identity.‖(Brueccoli,p46)

3 The analysis of Gatsby’s greatness

Gatsby was a man who spared no efforts to achieve his dream-Daisy and his love. In order to realize it, he changed his name first and then made money by bootlegging. However, he did not get what he wanted and his dream failed. Finally, he was murdered by a man whose wife was killed by Daisy. Though he was dead his persistence was worth to be learned by us. From the idealism he idealized his ―American Dream‖and his life, and he lived in a life he imaged. Thus, his dream doomed to failure, but his courage and persistence were great.

3.1 Gatsby’s courage and persistence

Gatsby was completely a man who tried his best to promote his social status from a lower class to higher class. His perseverance, courage and efforts made him get numerous money and stride into the higher class. ―The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard-it was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby‘s mansion.‖（Fitzgerald,p9）From these words, we can speculate his efforts of being a rich man.

He fell in love with Daisy when he was a lieutenant and he wanted to get married with her. However, he joined the army oversea to fight. In the army, he wrote letters to Daisy to keep touch with each other. After he knew that Daisy was married to Tom who was very rich he intended to obtain Daisy again. Thus, he came back to Daisy‘s hometown to get some information of Daisy. For five years he inquired about her, and he also did some business to make money to attract Daisy to him. His courage and willpower for Daisy was great though he was failed at last.

In order to get money, he changed his name first and then inherited money from Cody. ―James Gatz-that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career-when he saw Dan Cody‘s yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior.‖(Fitzgerald, p97) At that time when Gatsby saw Cody, Cody was fifty years old and he was a rich man. Cody got lots of money through copper transactions in Mantana. Thus, many girls and women wanted to gain his money, trying their best to achieve their dreams. Cody asked Gatsby a few questions and found that Gatsby was quick and extravagantly ambitious. A few days later, Cody took him to Duluth and bought Gatsby a blue coat, six pairs of white duck trousers, and a yacht cap. Cody left some money to Gatsby but Gatsby received no money because Cody‘s woman Ella Kaye got it after Cody‘s death. What he got was appropriate education; the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the substantiality of a man.

Gatsby‘s pursuit for love, Daisy, and money and his continuous efforts to make them come true made him rich and obtained a higher social status. His courage and persistence were the characteristics of the ―American Dream.‖―Gatsby‘s life was filled with dream, the dream of beauty and love. He dedicated all his life to realize his dream.‖(张福勇)

3.2 Gatsby’s kindness and generosity

Every week Gatsby would hold party for all the guests coming to his gorgeous house. ―In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.‖(Fitzgerald, p49) ―On weekends his RollsRoyce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.‖(Fitzgerald, p49) ―Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York –every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves.‖(Fitzgerald, p49) Gatsby treated his guests with sumptuous feast and from all his actions he was known as a kind and generous man. When his guest‘s tore her gown on a chair, and Gatsby asked her name and address –a week later she got a package from Croirier‘s with a new evening gown in it. Gatsby treated all the people in his banquet well no matter others did not know him. And his smile was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it. His smile let other person feel comfortable. When Gatsby planned to meet Daisy in Carraway‘s house he asked his gardener to mow his lawn. He wanted to introduce Carraway a job as a reward.

3.3 Gatsby’s sacrifice spirit and filial piety, self-discipline

When Daisy drove Gatsby‘s car on the way home, Daisy killed Tom‘s mistress Myrtle without stopping. Gatsby kept silence in order to protect Daisy. And that night he waited outside of Daisy‘s house and saw if Tom tried to bother Daisy about that unpleasantness in that afternoon. ―He spoke as if Daisy‘s reaction was the only thing that mattered.‖(Fitzgerald, p140) The next day Gatsby was murdered by George and Daisy and Tom left for. He pursued his love and sacrificed his life at last. In this sense, he was a great man.

Gatsby also loved his father. After he died, his father drawn his book he owned when he was a child. On the last fly-leaf was printed the word SCHEDULE, and the GENERAL RESERVES. Gatsby visited his father two years ago and bought him a house. With the schedule and the reserves he wrote he would have a big future in front of him and ever since he made a success he was very generous with his father.

4 The analysis of Daisy’s and Tom’s meanness

Daisy and Tom belonged to the higher social class. ―They were the representatives of the aristocrats and they pursued life‘s elegance and pleasure. However, their spirit was empty so they spent money in idling away their bored life. They were selfish, irresponsible, had a degenerate moral.‖(苗永敏) ―They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…“(Fitzgerald, p174)From the mercantilism Tom and Daisy were cared about their wealth, not other people‘s feeling.

4.1 The analysis of Daisy

Daisy was a woman who was beautiful, elegant, lovely, and romantic but her pretty was just an illusion. She was a cold and detached person with an empty spirit. What she pursued was the desire for material.

4.1.1 Daisy’s beauty and her attractive voice

When carraway came to Daisy‘s house for the first time she wore a white dress which was rippling and fluttering as if she had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. When she asked Carraway some question in her low, thrilling voice Carraway was drawn his attention to it. Daisy‘s voice was the kind of voice that the ear followed up and down, as if each speech was an arrangement of notes that would never be played again. Her beauty and charming voice made many men propose her.

4.1.2 Daisy’s apathy, indifference, and selfishness

When Daisy killed Myrtle, she did not admit her mistake; instead, she and her husband Tom told George that it was Gatsby who killed Myrtle. After Gatsby went back home, she did not call him and she did not visit him as well after Gatsby‘s death. All she concerned was her luxurious life. Daisy had a daughter but their relationship was not mother and daughter. Pammy just liked a toy which was brought when its master needed it. She did not love her daughter but funny. She convinced Gatsby that she would go with him, but she still cared Tom‘s wealth and status and she knew that she still need them when she knew that Gatsby was not belonged to her social class.

As far as Daisy was concerned, moral, responsibility, and obligation did not exist in the world. To sum up, Daisy only cared about herself without taking other people into consideration. She could desert anyone in order to protect herself.

4.1.3 Daisy’s desire for material and money, and her empty spirit

Daisy and Gatsby fell in love with each other; however, when Gatsby took apart in the army she married Tom who was very rich because Gatsby was poor. During the five years Gatsby knew that he tried to get her again he must become rich through his efforts to attract Daisy to him. When Gatsby showed Daisy his ―achievement‖ to her, she was attracted. While Gatsby took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before Daisy, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk covered the table in many colored disarray, Daisy began to cry stormily and said she never saw these beautiful shirts. ―For Daisy felling itself was not a true thing but just a ?pose‘.‖(王晓环) As the words said by Gatsby that Daisy‘s voice was filled with money.

Daisy‘s spirit was blank and empty, she had not goal or idea to pursue or set up. Just as she said she did not know how to live that afternoon when Gatsby first came to her house, what she would do the next day, and the next thirty years.

4.2 The analysis of Tom

―Tom Buchanan lives according to a certain social code.‖(Bruccoli, p70) He belonged to the higher social class and he inherited the wealth from his family. Thus, he did not care the feeling of other person and he was cruel, selfish, and indifferent. He only paid attention to what he possessed no matter money or women. Tom was a playboy who traveled with a waitress of a hotel by driving and then dated Myrtle in New York. ―He was foolish, selfish, arrogant and supercilious.‖(苗永敏) He could have mistress and have a self-indulgence life but he could not bear his wife to have a man. ―She knew before we were married –God knows where!‖(Fitzgerald, p120) ―Tom was evidently perturbed at Daisy‘s running around alone, for on the following Saturday night he came with her to Gatsby‘s party.‖(Fitzgerald, p103)

4.2.1 Tom’s cruelty and crudity

When Tom was in New Haven he was one of the most powerful ends that ever played football. ―Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always learning aggressively forward.‖ (Fitzgerald,

p11) And that was the body capable of enormous leverage-a cruel body. His words and his voice were full of cruelty. When Carraway came to New York with Tom he lived in Tom and his mistress‘s apartment for one night. That night Carraway heard Tom Buchanan and Mrs Wilson discussing in impassioned voices, standing face to face. Tom beat Myrtle and broke her nose when she said Daisy‘s name. Tom was so crude that even his mistress he beat.

4.2.2 Tom’s selfishness and his awareness of his status and his possessions

Tom and his wife, Carraway and Jordan, and Gatsby went to city by driving car. On the way to New York, he refueled Gatsby‘s yellow car at George‘s garage and he knew that his possession-Myrtle would leave him. So he turned his head and looked back for Daisy‘s driving car, and if the traffic delayed Daisy and Gatsby he slowed up until they came into sight just because he was afraid to lose Daisy and Myrtle. When he went to New York with Myrtle, he let her seated in another car in order to avoid the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train. After Daisy killed his mistress, he told George selfishly that it was Gatsby who killed his wife for owning his Daisy. All he concerned were his possessions and he did not allow anyone to grab from him. He could do anything to grasp them.

5 The description of the follies

In Gatsby‘s splendid party, all the guests were not invited by Gatsby except a few of them. They got into automobiles which took them to Gatsby‘s house or they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby. And after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with an amusement park. They came to Gatsby‘s house without seeing him or knowing him but for a simplicity of their heart for joy. In the party, there were some celebrities, rich men, businessmen, who came from both East and West Egg. They did not know about Gatsby, so they guessed that Gatsby was killed a man once or Gatsby was a German spy. What they could guess the role Gatsby was bad. They came for enjoying their emotion. They danced on the canvas in Gatsby‘s garden; old men pushing young girls backwards in eternal graceless circles, superior couples holding each other tortuously, and keeping in the corner, many young girls dancing individually or relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the traps. With the dancing continuing, the hilarity was upsurged. They came all the summer to do these.

However, when Gatsby died no one came to see Gatsby; instead, they stayed away from Gatsby. When Carraway called them to take part in Gatsby‘s funeral, they all said they had no time, especially Gatsby‘s friend Wolfshiem. Carraway sent Gatsby‘s butler to New York with a letter to him and asked him to come to see Gatsby. He did not come but returned only a letter which said that he was sad to hear this news but he was very busy and his business could not mix with Gatsby‘s affairs. When Carraway phoned Gatsby‘s friends to come to his funeral, his friends just said that they would have a picnic or something else on Gatsby‘s funeral day and they said deliberately that they would do their best to get away and attend Gatsby‘s funeral. Even when Carraway went to New York to invite Mr. Wolfshiem to attend Gatsby‘s funeral, Wolfshiem did not see Carraway at first and after seeing Carraway he told him something about Gatsby‘s past and said that he would not come to Gatsby‘s funeral because he did not want his business disturbed by Gatsby‘s affairs. Gat sby‘s funeral was very cold and cheerless, without friends but his father, Carraway and the owl-glasses man. On that day it was rain as if God sympathized with him.

All of Gatsby‘s guests and friends were very selfish, indifferent and callous. They only concerned their wealth, money, social status and material enjoyment. They were the same class in which Tom and Daisy lived.

6 Conclusion

In the years when people desired material enjoyment, Gatsby‘s na?ve and mirage ―dream‖ doomed to fail. During those years, people did not care about other‘s feeling, even if the one was his or her relative. In the novel Fitzgerald vividly described the relation between people and people and this relationship was the reflection and refraction of the roaring twenties‘life. Because there were Tom and Daisy who stood for the upper class, Gatsby‘s would not success for the upper class was cold and cruel. Gatsby was the incarnation of his idealistic ―American Dream‖and he did every thing to realize his unpractical ideal. He was great although his dream was failed at last and he was killed eventually compared to the cold and cruel Tom, Daisy, and all the follies. His perseverance of achieving his dream was great, his unswervingly love for Daisy was great, his kindness for his guests was great, and his filial piety for his father was great.

―Gatsby was worth to sympathize with, and his life was beginning with a dream and ended with a dream. Gatsby‘s tragedy reflected a main contradiction that was the

contradiction between ideal and reality. Gatsby and Tom stood for the two main powers-one was the idealism which broke away from the reality, the other was extremely crude pragmatism.‖(娜仁花)It showed Gatsby‘s greatness by describing Tom‘s meanness. Even if Gatsby and his dream were lost he was still great for his doings.