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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 events from Fitzgerald’s early life appeared 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 Twenties”
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