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摘 要

弗朗西斯·斯科特·菲茨杰拉德是二十世纪美国最重要的作家之一，被推崇为“爵士时代”的编年史家和桂冠诗人。他不仅亲身经历了美国历史上“最会纵乐、最讲究绚丽”的时代的生活，而且以敏锐的目光，审视着那个时代所发生的一切。《了不起的盖茨比》于1925年发表，是二十世纪最优秀的小说之一。

美国梦在美国的文学史上扮演着十分重要的角色，同时，它在不同的时期也蕴含着不同的内涵。在《了不起的盖茨比》中，主人公盖茨比是为追求美国梦而最终牺牲自己的典例，他渴望以自己的信念和勇气以获取爱情以及物质上的收获，然而，由于他的梦想是一种对虚幻的渴望而不是建立在现实基础上的追求，最终导致了他美国梦的破灭。

本文从盖茨比的梦想的破灭着手，再通过文中许多的象征事物来解析美国梦破灭背后所燃起的新的希望。从新希望这一角度重新解析盖茨比的梦想的深刻内涵。

本篇论文一共可以划分为四个部分，第一部分介绍了菲茨杰拉德的生平、美国梦的概括发展和小说《了不起的盖茨比》；第二部分是文献综述；第三部分分析了盖茨比的梦想的破灭以及美国梦的破灭以及其中隐含的美国社会的新希望；最后一部分则是对全文的总结，揭示了美国梦的新内涵，当时情况下美国梦的破灭和盖茨比的死是不可避免的，但是历史的年轮依旧向前，希望之光依旧闪耀。

关键词：菲茨杰拉德，美国梦，新希望，象征

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements……………………………………………….…………i

Abstract (English)…………………………………………………………..…………ii

Abstract(Chinese)……………………………………………..…………....iii

1. Introduction ……………………………………………………………….1

1.1 Life and literature career of F. S. Fitzgerald………………..…...……..1

1.2 Brief Introduction of the American dream ………………………….....1

1.3 Brief Introduction of The Great Gatsby……………..………...….........2

2. Literature Review..........................................................................................3

2.1 Literature review of the American Dream…………………..……….....3

2.2 Literature review of The Great Gatsby …….…………………..….....4

3. The disillusion of the American Dream and new hope of the America society...5

3.1 The Disillusion of Gatsby’s Dream From his Tragedy…….…,,…….5

3.1.1 His Debutante: Daisy........................................................................5

3.1.2 His wealth.........................................................................................6

3.1.3 His Social Status and Social Relations.............................................6

3.2 The Disillusion of American Dream……………………………………8

3.3 The Analysis of Symbols of new hope in The Great Gatsb……………..8

3.3.1 The Green Light …………………………………………………...8

3.3.2 The Eye of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg…………………………..…...…8

3.3.3 The telephone and Gatsby’s Rolls-Royce…………………………..9

4. The New Interpretation of American Dream...............................................11

5. Conclusion……………………………………...………………………..…..12

Works cited…………………………………………….………………….……13

1. Introduction

1.1 Life and literature career of F. S. Fitzgerald

F.Scott Fitzgerald enjoyed the same reputation of the famous American writer with Earnest Hemingway and William Faulkner, in the 20^th century. He is best known for his novels and short stories and he is generally regarded as the literary spokesman of the Jazz Age. He is the mirror of the times during the 1920s in American society. Fitzgerald was both a victim and an onlooker of the extravagant American society. It was the golden age of American novels during 1920s to 1930s. Also it is to create the era of the American dream. In which he indulged at the same time, Fitzgerald looks on, with his own taste of it lays the unique perspective of the coaching, with all the serious moral standards, and describe a post-war United States “lost generation” for the destruction of the American Dream sad. As much as he enjoyed the “roaring” of the post-war boom year, he foresaw its doom and failure. Fitzgerald was a new literary voice, and his masterpieces include The Beautiful and Damed, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, Tales of the Jazz Age, The Side of Paradise.

Fitzgerald’s writing style is simple but graceful, which, relying on an accumulation of well-chosen and ironic details, is often very closely related to his theme. His prose is smooth, sensitive and completely original in its diction metaphors. In his chapters, he moved rapidly from one brightly presented scene to the next, leaving the tedious process of tradition to the reader’s imagination. He wrote about the life of young people, carefully observed from the middle class in the 1920s, about their discontent, their frustructions, and their suffering in mind.

Fitzgerald is the sacrifice of his times. He was very enthusiastic in the lavish life, at the same time, he still could use his critical eyes to observe them. In his story, Gatsby is contrasted most consistently with Nick. Critics point out that the former, passionate and active and the latter, sober and reflective, seem to represent two sides of Fitzgerald’s personality.

1.2 Brief Introduction of the American dream

The term American Dream was first used by James Adams in his book The Epic of America which was written in 1931. He states: The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. In 1848, James W. Marshall found gold in California and people began having golden dreams. That 19th century “American Dream” motivated the Gold Rush and because of this, California’s nickname is the “Golden State”.

It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown tired and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to get to the fullest stature of which they are capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the circumstances of birth or position.

1.3 Brief Introduction of The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F.Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby is his favorite novel, also a most obvious sign that his thought and style became mature. First published on April 10,1925, it is set on Long Island’s North Shore and in New York City during the summer of 1922 and is a critique of the American Dream.

Gatsby is a poor youth from the Midwest. He falls in love with Daisy, a girl from a wealthy family. As a poor lad, Gatsby is too poor to marry her, so Daisy is married to a rich young man named Tom Buchanan. Determined to win Daisy back, Gatsby engages himself in Bootlegging and other illegal activities, thus earns enough money to buy a magnificent mansion. There he hosts dazzling parties every weekend in the hope of attracting the Buchanans to come. By chance his next door neighbor, Nick is Daisy’s relative and he helps Gatsby to make an appointment. They finally come and Gatsby meets Daisy again. But he finds Daisy is no longer the ideal love of his dream. A sense of loss and disillusionment come over him. Daisy and Tom don’t really love each other. In fact, Tom has a mistress by the name of Myrtle Wilson, who is the wife of the owner of a garage. One day Daisy quarrels with Tom and in a fit of anger she drives Gatsby’s car and kills Myrtle in an accident. In order to protect themselves, Daisy and Tom plot to shift the blame on to Gatsby, saying Gatsby has an affair with Myrtle and he kills her eventually. Myrtle’s husband George Wilson breaks into Gatsby’s house and shot him to death. The Buchanans escape, and the only two persons attending Gatsby’s funeral are Nick and Gatsby’s father, who reads the news in newspaper.

2. Literature review

2.1 Literature review of the American Dream

Chen Zhuo said that wealth gained through dishonest labor, understandably, is unstable. Gatsby can become rich overnight and he may also go bankruptcy instantly. The corrupted means of wealth accumulated prescribes the corrupted the corrupted nature of his wealth, which is ramshackle, likely to collapse at any time. The spiritual aspect of Gatsby’s American dream is no different from the material aspect in terms of its corrupted nature. The traditional American dream, apart from the individual pursuit of happiness, also emphasizes personal responsibility for the public happiness. With both the material aspect and the spiritual aspect corrupted, Gatsby’s American dream is inevitably doomed. Furthermore, Gatsby is merely a typical representative of the thousands of Americans in 1920s. Through the archetypal story of Gatsby, Fitzgerald tells us the distorted and perverted American dream in 1920s is doomed a disillusionment. The tragedy of Gatsby is in fact the tragedy of the American dream. The ultimate death of Gatsby, in fact, prescribes the ultimate disillusionment of the American dream(15).

Ding Jianguo analyzed that in the beginning, the dream of Gatsby was rooted in the American Dream with his words that he inherited all the possession of the puritans in the colonial time. By setting the date September 12^th, 1906 which was the wrong time for the American Dream to realize, Fitzgerald tried to be ironic with Gatsby. When we see the disillusion of Gatsby in the novel, we know what it really means to be anachronistic. In the time Gatsby lived, the American Dream became a cultural myth and already lost its economic and social foundation with the time of the pioneer and Benjamin Franklin left behind in history (34).

William C. Perkins noted that in this beautiful novel, the author gives accurate and profound description on protagonist Gatsby’s dream, the perceptual language description and implicit vocabulary has reached a new height, so that the reader can think the crazy history years of the First World War. Although “American Dream” of “Equality” and “everyone can succeed” is disillusioned in this novel, a new generation of immigrants in the United States is trying to fought a good and their real “American Dream” (28). Elizabeth Boling stated that in appearance, the American Dream depicted in Fitzgerald’s work always ends with disillusion. But like what it shows in how the American Dream becomes in future, the spirit that nourished the American Dream is absent but not dead as the hope that Fitzgerald put on the spirit of the struggle for realization of the American Dream (2).The last sentence of The Great Gatsby said that “so we beat on, boast against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” which indicate the new hope of life and the American Dream.

2.2 Literature review of The Great Gatsby

Nowadays, more and more scholars show great interest in analyzing The Great Gatsby from different aspects.

Maxwell Perkins was the one who read the initial drafts of The Great Gatsby, and this is what he said about Fitzgerald on Nov.20,1924, “Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader’s eye can never quite focus upon him. His outlines are dim. Now everything about Gatsby is more or less mystery, i.e, more or less vague, and this way be somewhat of an artistic intention, but I think it is mistaken. Couldn’t he be physically described as distinctly as the others, and couldn’t you add one or two characteristics like the use of that phrase, “old sports”--not verbal, but physical ones, perhaps.”(11)First published by Scribner’s April 1925, The Great Gatsby received mixed reviews and sold poorly, in its first year, the book sold only 20,000 copies. The famous literary critic, H.L. Mencken still held a conservative comment on The Great Gatsby that this novel only told so simple a story that it couldn’t cause people’s resonate(16).Fitzgerald died in 1940, believing himself to be a failure and his work forgotten. However, the novel experienced a revival during World War II, and became a part of American high school curricular and numerous stage and film adaptations in the following decades. Today, The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be a literary classic and a contender for the title “Great American Novel”. T. S. Eliot, a famous poet, excellent dramatist and important literary critic, once told Fitzgerald that he had read The Great Gatsby for three times and considered it “the first step forward American fiction had taken since Henry James” (21). Murakami Haruki, the famous Japanese author of novels spoke highly of The Great Gatsby, he said “Every time I read this book, I feel excited. I really want to share my thoughts towards The Great Gatsby with others.”(2) He also said “If I did not read The Great Gatsby. May be I can write different things or maybe just write nothing. ” (35) In 1988 the Modern Library editorial board voted it in the 20^th century’s best American novel and second best English-language novel of the same time period.

3. The disillusion of the American Dream and new hope of the America society

3.1 The Disillusion of Gatsby’s Dream From his Tragedy

3.1.1 His Debutante: Daisy

Daisy’s personality maybe could use one sentence to describe, that is, she is beautiful and charming, at the same time, fickle, shallow, bored and sardonic, could not assume her responsibility. When she introduced her only daughter, she said: “I hope she’ll be a fool--that is the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” ( 51 )

Moreover, at the beginning of the novel, the author said: “Then wear the gold hat,if that will move her. If you can bounce high, bounce for her too. Till she cry ‘Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!’ ”( 9 ) So, money seems to be one of the very top priorities in her life, and everyone that she surrounds herself with, including her daughter, seem to accept this as mere fact with her. She married to Tom, because of Tom’s rich. When visited Daisy’s mansion for the first time, Nick mentioned:

“Her husband, among various physical accomplishments,had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—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. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.”(58)

Gatsby is attracted by a certain quality of sound that resides in Daisy’s voice. Here is Nick’s understanding of Daisy’s voice: “It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.”(65) When Gatsby meet the woman he’s been waiting for all these years, but it is a kind of a letdown. Nick said:

“As I watch him, he adjusted himself visibly. His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear, he turned her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed. That voice was a deathless song.”( 124 )

So everything else about Daisy actually could be, and is, over-dreamed, and Gatsby almost knows that he’s projected too much onto Daisy that there’s no way she can live up to all the projections of all those years that he’s been involving her in. Gatsby knows that Daisy’s voice is full of money and selfish. She is just not a very brave person and she’s not a very feisty person. She doesn’t have sturdiness of nerve, and she loses her nerve at a critical moment, both at this very critical moment but also in a kind of abstract way when Gatsby needed her to stand by him. She’s really not there for him. In the end, Daisy returns to her husband after killing a woman by accident. “Daisy leaves the trouble for Gatsby who take it willingly and innocently.” ( 213 )

3.1.2 His wealth

In order to be wealthy enough to win Daisy back, Gatsby attempted the illegal sale of alcohol (“bootlegging”), which was prohibited in the United States in the 1920s. He made friends with the notorious Meyer Wolfsheim, who was the racketeer who supposedly fixed the World Series of 1919. He was Gatsby’s connection to organized crime, in which Gatsby became rich.

His dream resulted in the corrupted way of achieving it and it turned out that the dream he had been pursuing so eagerly was itself corrupted, and this inevitably led to his devastating ending. Gatsby’s lavish parties, extravagant mansion, and giant collection of clothing he does not wear, all represent how his dream had been corrupted. For example, the author said:

“Every Friday five cates of oranges and lemons arrived from fruiter in New York. Every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves.”( 75 )

Every Friday, Gatsby spend a large amount of money to hold parties. People from different places will gather together to enjoy themselves. But there is nothing left to him after his death, he was treated as an offender and his wealth no longer means anything.

3.1.3 His Social Status and Social Relations

As we all know, in the bourgeois society only a few people can make their fortune, and those people make their fortune by crushing others, or by some means or cruel and evil force or trickery. This is the real reflection of Gatsby. Gatsby was born in a common family and he is the son of a farmer, then he becomes an upstart through some illegal activities, he even changed his name after becoming rich. Actually Gatsby lives a short time luxuriously with his will, which is get rich. But those who have deeper roots, power and influence overwhelmed him.The United States has long been known as a “melting pot”. The Long Island can be called a small “melting pot”. The East Egg is an area belongs to the old rich but the West Egg is an area of newly rich people.

Fitzgerald descibed Tom like this:

“Tom shinning arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and give him the appearance of always leaning aggresively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of that body he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage a cruel body. His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked and there were men at New Heaven who hated his guts.”(7)

In fact, Tom is the symbol of the commercialization which brought the country only moral depravity in this novel. So he looked down upon Gatsby. When he went to join Gatsby’s party, he said: “A man in the pink suit went to Oxford?” When the upper class are enjoying Gatsby’s free dinner, they never lose a moment to look down upon him. They spread rumors about Gatsby, saying “he is a cousin of Kaiser Wilhem”(33), “a German spy” and an “Oxford man”, “he killed a man”(44) and was involved in “the underground pipeline to Canada.” (117). So, it is not only a Tom, but the whole upper class fight against him. To the last he didn’t awake to the reality that his dream is a twisted illusion. In the end, the author writes,

“He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He didn’t know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”（215）

After Myrtle’s husband George Wilson breaks into Gatsby’s house and shot him to death. No one turns up for his funeral, though hundreds of people have eaten at his place. The Buchanans escape, and the only two persons attending Gatsby’s funeral are Nick and Gatsby’s father, who reads the news in newspaper. It is a sad comment on human nature that when a man dies, he is alone, absolutely alone.

3.2The Disillusion of American Dream

During the whole history of America, there is an important, never forgotten period, that is , the development of the western land. At that time, America had been “a fresh, green breast of the new world,” had pandered to all human dreams and promised something like “the orgiastic future” for humanity. In fact, to some extent, just as Fitzgerald saw it(and Nick explains in chapter 9), the American dream was originally about discovery, individualism, and the pursuit of happiness. To some extent, the character’s dream in The Great Gatsby reflects the common dream of the whole America. They had strong faith in their ability to achieve their dream if there is any fair chance.

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