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II. The Great Gatsby
2.1 Introduction of the Novel
The Great Gatsby is considered not only the most prominent work of F.Scott Fitzgerald, but also one of the most outstanding novels in Modern American Fiction. The detail on art world in the novel deeply exposes the emptiness of the American worship of wealth and the endless American dreams of love and desires. It is a symbol of an era. On the art form, it still enjoys a high reputation now.
The Great Gatsby is a novel about American dreams. Nick Carrawlly is a young man from the Middle Western American. He leaves home to East American for life. During his adrift life, he is acquainted with the fiction’s protagonist Gatsby and witnesses the whole process of Gatsby’s tragedy. Nick uses a special narrative form to describe a story of this poor Mid-Westerner Jay Gatsby. The young Gatsby loves Daisy who has married Tom Buchana. In fact, Gatsby is a brute man. He participates in various criminal activities, including bootlegging. Drawn by his wealth and his devotion, Daisy becomes his mistress. In order to protect her, he is shot by Myrtle’s husband. When he is dying, all of his so-called friends abandon him except Nick.
In this novel, the author Fitzgerald combines the background with its form perfectly. Through using the new narrative point of view and the exquisite arrangement of spatio-temporal structure, the author produces a dramatic effect on strengthening the specific artistic charm and highlight the novel’s theme. All of these things fully reflect the author’s effort for the development of traditional narrative skills.
2.2 The Author of the Novel
Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul, Mirnesota, in 1896. He was the only son of a socially prominent and genteelly poor family. With the financial aid of relatives he entered Princeton University. In 1917, he left before graduating to serve in the US Army in Alabama. In Alabama he engaged to Zelda Sayre. After his discharge from the army in 1919, he took a job with an advertising agency and worded on short stories and novels at night. Eventually his first novel, The Side of Paradise was accepted for publication and appeared in March 1920. It was an instant success and brought Fitzgerald fame and wealth. In the same year Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre got married. They plunged into the gaudy, wealthy society of their generation. The couple lived so extravagantly that they frequently spent more money than their peers. So Fitzgerald kept on writing. In 1922, he published his second novel The Beautiful and Damned. He also published a collection of short stories, such as Tales of the Jazz Age in 1992. In 1925, Fitzgerald successfully completed The Great Gatsby. It was a critical success but the failure of the business. 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.