从《了不起的盖茨比》中的男性形象看美国梦的破灭.doc

毕 业 设 计（论文）

题 目
从《了不起的盖茨比》中的男性形象看美国梦的破灭

专 业 英 语
学生姓名
学 号 110341039
指导教师

2015年4月21日

Contents

Abstract 3
摘要 3
1. Introduction 4
2. Male Characters’ American Dreams 6
2.1. The Tragic Hero Gatsby 6
2.2. The Dramatic Narrator Nick 7
2.3. The Ugly Upper-class Tom 8
3. Fitzgerald’s American Dream 9
3.1. Fitzgerald’s Pursuit for Love and Wealth 10
3.2 Fitzgerald’s Ration in the “Jazz Age” 11
3.3 Fitzgerald’s Sense of Failure 13
4. The Relationship between the Male Characters and Fitzgerald 15
4.1. Gatsby and Fitzgerald 16
4.2. Nick and Fitzgerald 17
4.3. Tom and Fitzgerald 18
5. Conclusion 20
Bibliography 21

Abstract

The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest novels in Modern American literature. It is a highly symbolic meditation on the disintegration of the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess. On the one hand, Fitzgerald shows a running theme of how the American Dream affects all of the characters in The Great Gatsby, especially the major male characters Gatsby, Nick and Tom. He also uses the distinctive writing style to introduce the three major male characters. On the other hand, according to Fitzgerald’s personality and experience, the three male characters are generally considered being written autobiographically reflecting the different sides of the author’s characters, which attracts readers to some extent.

Key words: American Dream, Daisy Buchanan, Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

摘 要

《了不起的盖茨比》是美国现代文学史上最优秀的作品之一。它反思了一个空前繁荣、物质过剩时代的美国梦的破灭，展现了美国梦对人们日常生活的消极影响，尤其是对男性人物（盖茨比、尼克、汤姆）的影响上。尽管他们对自己的生活都充满了雄伟的抱负，但变质了的美国梦却粉碎了他们的梦想。此外，菲茨杰拉德还运用独特的手法描述了这三个特殊的男性人物；通过对这三个人物与菲茨杰拉德的对照可以看出：作者从某种程度上说是在讲述自己的经历，盖茨比、尼克、汤姆实际上是作家个性特点三个不同侧面的反映，这也是小说之所以成功的魅力所在。

关键词: 美国梦；黛西·布坎南；菲茨杰拉德；《了不起的盖茨比》

ON THE MALE CHARACTERS
IN THE GREAT GATSBY

1. Introduction
Reading Fitzgerald’s works, we can remind of many literary values from them. People usually show more interests on Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. Some articles about The Great Gatsby have been published, such as American Dream and Character Symbolization in the Novel The Great Gatsby Chen Mei, Jin Yue. Journal of Qiqihar University (Phi & Soc Sci), September. 2003.
,On Nick Carraway’s Dual Roles in The Great Gatsby Du Yong-xin. Joural of Sichuan International Studies University, Jan . , 2001.
,Gatsby: Another Fitzgerald Xie Jiashum. Joural of Tangshang Polytechnic College, Vol. 13, No. 3, 2000.
,etc. These arguements are both odds and ends, not integrated. So, the aim of this article is to perfectly introduce the three male characters (Gatsby, Nick and Tom). And as we have known, only having enough understanding of the author and his personal life, the article can be drawed clearly.
Although at that time, Mark Twain and William Dean Howells thought that America would become the hope of the whole world, F. Scott Fitzgerald gradually found that that so-called new world was totally a disaster. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who lived in the midst of the “roaring twenties” and was part of it all--driving fast cars, drinking hard whisky, and showing an immense delight in those, was perceptive enough to recognize that America was “a moon that never roses.” And as much as he enjoyed the “roaring” of the post--war boom years, he also foresaw its doom and failure.
Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul. In his younger age,he attended a private school in New Jersey, then he went to Princeton University. Academic difficulties forced him out of Princeton midway through his junior year; he returned the following fall but he left his college permanently in 1917 and decided to join the army, as World War I neared its end. While stationed in Montgomery, Alabama, he met and immediately 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. And 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. In 1922 he published his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned and a collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age. In 1925 Fitzgerald managed to complete his masterpiece: The Great Gatsby. His next novel, Tender Is the Night (1934) was received coldly mainly because America was deep in the Great Depression and nobody wanted to read about expatriates in France. Battered by the failure of the book and Zelda’s mental breakdowns, he drank to excess and grew seriously ill, died in 1940.
Fitzgerald is a famous American modern writer and is called “spokesman in the Jazz Age”. And his greatness lies in the fact that he found intuitively in his personal experience the embodiment of the nation and created a myth out of American life. The story of The Great Gatsby is a good illustration. T. S. Eliot read The Great Gatsby three times and concluded that it was “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.” T. S. Eliot. Letter to Scott Fitzgerald . New York: New York Press, 1925.

The main theme of The Great Gatsby meditates on 1920s American as a whole, in particular the break up of the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material . Fitzgerald positions the characters of The Great Gatsby as emblems of these social trends. The Great Gatsby shows a running theme of how the American dream affects all of the characters: they each have their own aspiration for their own life, but, ironically, their aspiration is only revolved around wealth, and the core of their life is to enjoy happiness from money. And, Daisy, the only heroine, who relates with the other characters, has a perfect vantage point in the story---- she is Gatsby’s lover, Nick’s cousin, Tom’s wife, and all three are closely linked because of her. Besides, The Great Gatsby is also an autobiographical novel. Fitzgerald combines his experience with the male characters, such as Gatsby, Nick and Tom showing his own experience, life and dream.

2. The Male Characters’ American Dream
The Great Gatsby is a novel that illustrates the society in the 1920s and the associated beliefs, values and dreams of the American people at that time. These beliefs, values and dreams can be summed up be what is termed the “American Dream”: a dream of money, wealth, prosperity and the happiness that supposedly came with the booming economy and get-rich-quick schemes that formed the essential underworld of American upper-class society. Scott Fitzgerald illustrates the American Dream and the “foul dust” or the carelessness of a society that floats in the wake of this dream. According to the characters’ respective expectation, it can be seen that the American Dream is not confined to one social class or type of person, but to the whole nation, everyone.

2.1. The Tragic Hero Gatsby
In the novel, Gatsby reveals himself to be an innocent, hopeful young man who stakes everything on his dream, not realizing that his dream is unworthy of him. To Gatsby, his dream is of spiritual reunion with Daisy, but his prior dream is wealth. He thinks that wealth can solve all his problems: time, Daisy, and love. “‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’……‘I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,’ he said , nodding determinedly. ‘She’ll see.’” (Fitzgerald 2004: 148) In the novel, Gatsby uses the most lavish party, sumptuous mansion, and gorgeous machine to impress Daisy. And the green light, situated at the end of Daisy’s East Egg dock, represents Gatsby’s hopes and dreams for the future. Gatsby associates it with Daisy.
“‘If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,’ said Gatsby. ‘You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock..’
Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.” (Fitzgerald 2004: 125)
In fact, the green light stands for the achievements achieved by Gatsby to some extent. It leads Gatsby to go after the future, the glorious phantasm in his ideal world, not only the love for Daisy.
However, Gatsby’ dream is bound to fail. On the one hand, he acquires immense wealth through criminal activities, for instance, bootlegging. “‘He and this Wolfsheim go and sold grain alcohol over the counter.’ ” (Fitzgerald 2004: 179) This is the opposite idea of the American Dream, which states that only the good, virtuous and hard working are rewarded. On the other hand, he held an unrealistic view of life and how he could recreate the past. His dreams has distorted in the reality, when his rationality realizes that the image of life and of Daisy does not coincide with the real life version. The devastating end of his dream is the finish of The Great Gatsby. Just as Fitzgerald sees the American dream crumbling in the 1920s, American powerful optimism, vitality, and individualism become subordinated to the amoral pursuit of wealth.

2.2. The Dramatic Narrator Nick
Nick Carraway is a pragmatic man, who comes from the Middle West. He has distinctive temperament and value standard. “‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’” (Fitzgerald 2004: 1) He is also a sober, intellect and reflective one and makes the objective judgment and evaluation to the major characters. His final choice reflects the author’s moral orientation.
In The Great Gatsby, he does not share the American dream. But still he is striving for something, and he wants to be himself, as he sees himself, tolerant, objective and reliable. The money of the upper class is just a tiny bit of his dream together with his admiration for the rich East Eggers. Mainly, his dream consists of mental values, of a pursuit of honesty. He praise highly of himself: “I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.” (Fitzgerald 2004: 80).
“That’s my Middle West …the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark…I see now that this has a story of the West, after all —Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly un adaptable to Eastern life.” (Fitzgerald 2004: 235)
The above sentences show that Nick realizes for the first time that though his story is set on the East Coast, the western character of his acquaintances (“some deficiency in common”) is the source of the story’s tensions and attitudes. He considers each character’s behavior and value choices as a reaction to the wealth-obsessed culture of New York. This perspective contributes powerfully to Nick’s decision to leave the East Coast and return to Middle West in search of a less morally ambiguous environment. Though he gives up the opportunity to become rich, he scrupulously abides by his moral criterion.

2.3. The Ugly Upper-class Tom
Whilst Tom’s interpretation of the American dream does involve money, it is not his prime concern as it is with many of the other characters. His dream also concentrates on power gained through the prestige that is associated with property. “His family were enormously wealth……but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away; for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest” (Fitzgerald 2004: 8) His self-confidence and utter belief in his superiority are an example of how he thinks about himself in relation to all other people, especially to the low-class man, Wilson. He uses his social status and physical strength to dominate those around him. For example, he subtly taunts Wilson while having an affair with his wife, experiences on guilt for his immoral behavior, and does not hesitate to lash out violently in order to preserve his authority over Myrtle in Chapter 2. He is so desperately an empty man that he consider himself as exterior belongings. He is trying to find his identity by looking for happiness in nice cars (it is a ridiculous yellow luxury vehicle), money and a good woman.
Tom’s dream of power and superiority leads to his moral decline by ruining his marriage with Daisy and ultimately her wishes of having a truly happy marriage. Not only does his lack of morals affect Daisy and her happiness, it also fosters the situation of Gatsby’s and George’s death.
“‘I told him the truth, ’he said. ‘He came to the door while we were getting ready to leave, …He was crazy enough to kill me if I hadn’t told him who owned the car.…’ He broke off defiantly. ‘What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy’s, but he was a tough one. …’.” (Fitzgerald 2004: 239)
Tom is the ultimate example of how the effect of the American dream caused the society to change their morals and exhibit action that is detrimental to society in general.

3. Fitzgerald’s American Dream
“American Dream” is the most common but important concept in America, related to the early history of this country. But time has endowed the conception with dramatically different meaning. Originally, people in America upheld a thought of American Dream to strive for a peaceful and abundant country which can offer its people the basic needs of life, nevertheless, that’s not the case in 1920s. First thirty years of 19th century witnessed a significant and dramatic change in Western world, impacting on the whole society, bringing people with pain, alienation and puzzles. Meanwhile, a newly emerged musical form derived from the slave songs and their spirituals. Due to the widely spreading and appeal, the 1920s was also called the Jazz Age. No longer representing a traditional merit of their ancestors’ hardness and diligence, the American Dream then was deformed into greedy for money because of the World War and Great Depression, depriving common people of their sense of security and beliefs. Influenced by such a fast changing world, Americans were more practical and material than ever. The old American Dream had long gone and Fitzgerald was one of the victims. It was during this period Fitzgerald experienced his pattern of life: from a beautiful dream to the cruel disenchantment and finally to a state of thorough failure as well as despair.

3.1. Fitzgerald’s Pursuit for Love and Wealth
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