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F.Scott Fitzgerald was one of the most excellent American novelists of the Jazz Age and was called the poet laureate of the time. Fitzgerald set an example for a generation in literature whose first doctrine was: Do what you will. His work The Great Gatsby , published during the Jazz Age, considered as a fabulous work. Although it initially achieved little commercial success, this work later had become one of the most widely read and acclaimed works. It was the story of a young man’s longing for his ideal love. It was set in New York City and Long Island during the 1920s. The narrator of the whole story was Nick, working as a bond broker in Manhattan. He had some connections with the main characters-Daisy and Gatsby. So he had the chance to experience and be involved in Gatsby’s life. Gatsby had a brief relationship with Daisy before the war. Nevertheless, he lost Daisy and she married Tom because he had no money, but he still loved her. So after struggling for a large number of wealth, he came back to struggle for his love. He persuaded Daisy to be with him again. But he was revealed by Tom that he had made his money from bootlegging, which increased Daisy’s hesitation to go with Gatsby. When Daisy hit and killed Tom’s mistress carelessly, he chose to keep silent to protect Daisy. However, Tom told Myrtle’s husband Wilson that Gatsby killed his wife. Then Wilson shot Gatsby and committed suicide. And Nick was left alone to arrange Gatsby’s funeral and only Gatsby’s father and one former visit attended his funeral.
The Great Gatsby was widely read and acclaimed in American literature. And researchers all over the world had made researches on this work, most of which focused on the social life and social problem of America. The domestic research on The Great Gatsby mainly included these scopes, for example, Wang Hongdan’s interpretation of the spiritual ecology of The Great Gatsby (2010); Liu Giu’s analysis of shaping the character of Daisy in The Great Gatsby (2010); Gan Yuanyuan’s stylistic study of The Great Gatsby (2006) . While the foreign research on The Great Gatsby focused on the American dream, a hot spot of today’s social study. For instance, Richard Lehan analyzed the reason of the vanish of American Dream in The Great Gatsby (1990). John F.Callahan portrayed the American social scenery of “Jazz Age”, and showed the disillusion of the American Dream (1996).
We can discover that the predecessors’ researches on The Great Gatsby stayed at the level of the influence of the America dream. And they didn’t touch into the research on the reflections of Fitzgerald’s life in The Great Gatsby. American Dream is one of the influential factors of the creation of the characters in The Great Gatsby, so is the author’s life. And this thesis tries to use the prototype theory to analyze this aspect. The prototype theory is a cognitive science theory developed by Eleanor Rosch with help from other experts in the field of cognitive psychology in the early 1970s. In Rosch’s theory, people categorize items and concepts based on a prototype or ideal representation of that category. The prototype theory is used in this thesis to find the sources of the creation of characters in The Great Gatsby based on Fitzgerald’s life.
And this thesis is designed to analyze the masterpiece from the point of connections and similarities between the author and the characters in The Great Gatsby. Firstly, it introduces the background of the author and the time, then probes into Fitzgerald’s life and marriage to discover the influence of his marriage on the creation of the characters in The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s and Zelda’s mutual influence to pave the way for later analysis. Finally this thesis has deep analysis of the connections and similarities of Fitzgerald’s and Gatsby’s insistence on love, views on materialism and their tragic fate.