摘 要

象征作为一种独特的艺术表现手法，已经被广泛地运用于小说和其他艺术作品之中。它往往旨在用具体的事物指代隐匿的、抽象的事物，如情感以及理念等等。作为菲茨杰拉德的代表作，《了不起的盖茨比》不仅是在人物描写还是在情节叙述中，都运用了大量的象征手法，描写了战后美国年轻一代心中的“美国梦”破灭的过程以及原因，从而使得小说的寓意更加深刻，情节更加紧扣，主题也得以深化。本文将从多个角度对小说中的象征主义写作手法进行解读，揭露象征主义在加深小说主旨上所起到的作用以及现实与理想之间的差距以及物质主义对人类灵魂的侵蚀。

关键词：象征主义 美国梦 景物象征 场景象征

1. Introduction

1.1 Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald, born on September 24, 1896, was named after his ancestor Francis Scott Key, the author of The Star-Spangled Banner. He was raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. Although an intelligent boy in childhood, he did not perform very well in school and was sent to a New Jersey boarding school in 1911. Being a mediocre student there, he managed to enroll at Princeton in 1913. However, he suffered from academic troubles and apathy throughout his time at college and he never graduated. Instead, as World War I neared its end, he enlisted in the army in 1917. It is worthwhile to mention that many of events in Fitzgerald’s early life appear in his most famous novel The Great Gatsby, which was published in 1925. For instance, like Fitzgerald, Nick is a thoughtful young man coming from Minnesota and was educated at an Ivy League school (in Nick’s case, Yale). Also similar to Fitzgerald is Gatsby, a sensitive young man who pursues wealth and luxury and falls in love with a beautiful young woman while stationed at a military camp in the South. After becoming a celebrity, Fitzgerald fell into a wild, reckless life-style of parties and decadence, while desperately trying to please his lover by writing in order to earn a large amount of 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 will enable him to regain Daisy’s love. Unfortunately, as the giddiness of the Roaring Twenties dissolved into the bleakness of the Great Depression, Zelda (Fitzgerald’s lover) suffered a nervous breakdown and Fitzgerald battled alcoholism, which adversely affected his writing. Then, 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 novelist of 1920s America, an era that he dubbed “the

Jazz Age”. Written in 1925, The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest literary documents of this period, in which the American economy soared and brought 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, 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.” (Chase, 1997: 82) 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 represents 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.

1.2 A brief introduction to the Symbolism

Symbolism refers to the use of one object or action (a symbol) to represent or suggest something else. The Symbolism we deal with nowadays mainly refers to using tangible objects to represent something abstract or invisible, namely, to reside rational knowledge to images. Broadly, the term Symbolism may refer to the symbolic meaning or the practice of investing things with a symbolic meaning. In 1886, Morey Elias gave a formal definition of Symbolism in Symbolism Definition: The poetry of Symbolism is as the enemy of “teachings, reading skills, false ability and objective description,” what it explores is to empower the thinking in the form of sensitive, but the form is of non-exploration purposes, and both contribute to the performance of ideology and subordinate to ideology.” (Morey, 1986: 28) Though often associated with religion and literature, Symbolism is prevalent in everyday life. But why do writers use symbols in literature? What is its importance? The Symbolism in literature is one of the many tools that writers employ in order to generate not only interest in one's work but also to create another level of meaning or give meaning to the literary work that goes beyond what is evident to the reader. Also, “Symbolism helps to give a mood to the piece without the writer having to actually spell it out. By giving human-like characteristics to certain things and also defining them with certain qualities, the writer can manage to give the novel another level.” (Chadwick, 1991: 3) This may refer to things which are completely alien from what is mentioned in the piece of writing. This article attempts to study The Great Gatsby from the perspective of various symbolic images in the book.

2. Literature Review

In fact, as the earliest literature genre in western literature, Symbolism can be traced back to France in Mid-19th century. And it quickly spreads to other western countries and becomes a well-known international literary genre. It is worth to mention that many scholars and poets play a vital role in developing the Symbolism. Additionally, they make the best of the methods of symbols, clues, analogies and associations to express their hidden ideas and subtle emotions.

2.1 The research of Symbolism home and abroad

As we all know, Baudelaire is the first poet who puts forward the concept of Symbolism. In the Flowers of Evil, he successfully employs Symbolism to describe a recluse who tries to live between darkness and light, soul and body. In addition, Baudelaire holds the idea that the whole universe is just like a symbolic system and proposes the Symbolism-Induction theory. Moreover, “the world is closely connected with the material. Since the nature is filled with a large amount of mystery, what the humanity needs to do is to perceive and explore the nature.” (Baldick, 2000: 219) In his well-known poem Flowers of Evil, the induction has provided an important platform for the use of Symbolism. More importantly, it is worthwhile to mention that since the pre-Symbolism has evolved into an independent literary branch, many related theories were developed and perfected by Verlaine and Mara, who made the Symbolism reach its peak. As for Verlaine, he puts forward the concept of music principle of Symbolism for the first time. He is convinced that the music in Art of Poetry constitutes the primary implication of Symbolism. In Art of Poetry, he underscores that the primary thing of everything is invariably music. In his masterpiece, he combines cantus, ambiguous connotation and unstable emotional melodies together to express the poets’ emotions including happy, sad, anxiety and aspiration. Both the magic rhythm of music and the dance all play a vital role in putting people in heavenly poetry. As for Rimbaud, he further develops and enriches the theories of Baudelaire. Additionally, he proposed the theory of Psychic, believing that “a symbolic poet should be a psychic, and he becomes a psychic after making a variety of mistakes of functional, long-term, limitless and intentional.” (Massa, 1992: 50)

As for Mallarme, he is considered the symbol of Symbolism. Additionally, he pays great attention on the connotation of Symbolism as well as the mysteries inside the poems. He believes that “calling out the name of a thing would destroy over half of the fun of poems, and the perfect use of method constitutes a symbol. One must show the state of mind through leading things step by step; or conversely, one must select one of things, and lead to a certain state of mind with a serious of deciphered methods.”(Ibid, 55) In his magnum opus, the suggestibility is successfully used and the pure beauty is still pursued by the author. Mallarme is detached from the reality, which is why he considers the dream the highest state of a poem. Moreover, he is convinced that a good poet must be in possession of pure beauty that can’t be found in reality in order to help the poet build the nest of the pure poet.