On the Male Characters in The Great Gatsby.doc

on the male characters in the great gatsbyon the male characters in the great gatsbyacknowledgementsmy deepest gratitude goes first and foremost to my supervisor, ms *, whose brief instructions guided my thesis along the right direction, whose experienced suggestions prevented me from making the possible mistakes that a new hand was likely to make, who read through my thesis and corrected it with tolerance. second, i would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to professor nie wei, who led me into the world of american literature. i am also greatly indebted to all the professors and teachers at the department of english for their creative and patient teaching during the four years of my studies, which are helpful not only for my studies here, but also for my future career.last, my thanks would go to my beloved family for their loving considerations and great confidence in me all through these years. i also owe my sincere gratitude to my friends and my fellow classmates who gave me their help and time in listening to me and helping me work out my problems during the difficult course of the thesis. abstractfrancis scott fitzgerald (1896-1940) is a famous american writer in the first half of the twentieth century. he is regarded as the spokesman for “the lost generation” in american literature. in 1925, he published his masterpiece the great gatsby. the great gatsby has closer relationship with the american experiences than his other works do. it is a highly symbolic meditation on the disintegration of the american dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess.this paper focuses its attention on the male characters in the great gatsby.the first part analyzes the three male characters american dreams. the tragic hero gatsby, the dramatic narrator nick and the ugly upper-class tom, all bear strong aspiration of their own life. however, the difference between ideals and reality lead to the unavoidable destruction of their american dream. the second part studies their relations with daisy. the third part deeply explores fitzgeralds self-reflection upon the male characters. on one hand, fitzgerald shows a running theme of how the american dream affects all of the characters in the great gatsby, especially the major male charactersgatsby, nick and tom. on the other hand, according to fitzgeralds personality and experiences, the three male characters are generally considered being written autobiographically reflecting different sides of the authors characters, which attracts readers to some extent.key words: american dream; fitzgerald; the great gatsby; american don quixoteii摘要弗司各特菲茨杰拉德(1896-1940)是二十世纪初美国著名作家，被认为是美国文学中“迷惘一代”的代言人。一九二五年，他出版了代表作了不起的盖茨比。有评论说，了不起的盖茨比在爱情故事后面隐藏着一股哀伤的细流，流露出菲茨杰拉德对于美国梦想的失望。它反思了一个空前繁荣、物质过剩时代的美国梦的破灭，展现了美国梦对人们日常生活的消极影响，尤其是对男性人物（盖茨比、尼克、汤姆）的影响。本文主要解读了不起的盖茨比中的男性形象，共分三个部分。第一章简要分析书中三位男性人物：悲剧英雄盖茨比、故事的叙述者尼克、丑陋的上层阶级汤姆。尽管他们对自己的生活都充满了雄伟的抱负，但变质了的美国梦却粉碎了他们的梦想。第二章进一步试探盖茨比、尼克、汤姆与戴西之间的关系。第三章深入剖析菲茨杰拉德与盖茨比、尼克的关系。从根本意义上说，了不起的盖茨比是一部有“二元”主角的小说它既是关于盖茨比的故事，也是“关于”尼克的故事，而这两个人最终都演化成为道德象征：盖茨比体现了精神颓废，而尼克则代表了一种对道德成熟和精神成熟的期盼。菲茨杰拉德运用独特的手法描述了这三位特殊的男性人物。通过对这三个人物与菲茨杰拉德的对照可以看出：作者从某种程度上是在讲述自己的经历，盖茨比、尼克、汤姆实际上是作家个性特点三个不同侧面的反映，这也是小说成功的魅力所在。关键词：美国梦，菲茨杰拉德，了不起的盖茨比,美国式唐吉柯德table of contents论文诚信声明iacknowledgementsiiabstractiii摘要ivintroduction1chapter i male characters american dreams31.1. the tragic hero gatsby31.2. the dramatic narrator nick51.3. the ugly upper-class tom8chapter ii the relationship between the male characters and daisy102.1. gatsby and daisys sweetheart relationship102.2. nick and daisys relative relationship122.3. tom and daisys conjugal relationship13chapter iii the relationship between the male characters and fitzgerald163.1. gatsby and fitzgerald183.1.1. similar background183.1.2. similar experiences193.1.3. similar tragic fates213.2. nick and fitzgerald213.2.1. the double vision213.2.2. the spokesman of fitzgerald22 conclusion24bibliography.27iion the male characters in the great gatsbyintroductiontime and tide make the man. this is true with francis scott fitzgerald, an outstanding american novelist and short story writer in the modern period.fitzgerald was born on september 24, 1896, in st. paul, minnesota, the staid american middle west then, where he was brought up, though his life and writings are associated with the fashionable east coast. in 1913, he went to princeton, at his time one of the most prestigious and traditional american universities. he left college in 1917 because of academic difficulties and enlisted in the army, serving as a lieutenant at a staff headquarters when the united states entered world war i. while stationed in montgomery, he met and fell in love with a wild seventeen-year-old beauty named zelda sayre, who became the model for most of the pretty, merry heroines of his fiction later. 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. and 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. in 1922 he published his second novel, the beautiful and damned and a collection of short stories, tales of the jazz age. in 1925 fitzgerald managed to complete his masterpiece: the great gatsby, foreseeing the doom and failure of the post-war boom years of the “roaring twenties” in the midst of which he lived. 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 zeldas mental breakdowns, he drank to excess and grew seriously ill, died in 1940.fitzgerald was the most famous chronicler 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, bringing unprecedented levels of prosperity to the nation. it is a picture of the prohibition era and a masterpiece related with irony and pathos to the legendry of the “american dream”, and received favorable comments from the famous critics t.s. eliot, never a hasty or extravagant critic, praised the novel was “the first step that american fiction has taken since henry james”. the great gatsby tells the life story of jay gatsby, a pursuer of the american dream, who is once a nobody from the midwest. in order to regain daisys love, the embodiment of the american dream in his eyes, gatsby makes his way into the riches and even becomes one of them by means of illegal business. yet he finally finds his pursuit in vain, and he is murdered indirectly by daisy and her husband in the end.the great gatsby shows a running theme of how the american dream affects all of the characters: they each have their own aspiration for their own life, but, ironically, their aspiration is only revolved around wealth and the core of their life is to enjoy happiness from money. fitzgerald combines his own experiences with his nations experiences and reflects the features of his time. chapter imale characters american dreamsthe american dream had existed long before “the declaration of independence” was formally written by thomas jefferson in 1776. “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” (tang sooping, 1980: 11)people felt it, were inspired by it and were united by it as a nation. in spite of all the distances between dream and reality, every hundred of years, there rose up a model of success, who was nobody at the beginning and somebody at last, who strengthened the belief of the american dream in peoples hearts rather than minds, who seemed to prove where there was a dream there was a way. the american dream could be amazingly bold. an ordinary american citizen might dream of succeeding the president. little fitzgerald imagined he was the son of a king and his gatsby imagined “he was a son of god”. according to the characters respective expectation, it can be seen that the american dream was not confined to one social class or type of person, but to the whole nation, everyone. these male characters in the great gatsby whose human values have been corrupted due to the corrupting influence of money. the characters believe the american dream is nothing else than glamorous material wealth, which in essence will set them apart from the rest of lower class society. the pursuit of this american dream produces nothing but problems for the characters. 1.1. the tragic hero gatsbythe title character of the great gatsby is a young man, around thirty years old, who rise from an impoverished childhood in rural north dakota to become fabulously wealthy, all due to his pursuit of ideals. the ideals that gatsby strives to achieve are: the acquisition of wealth, re-defining his character in the pursuit of perfection, and attaining his ideal romantic love. his first ideal is to escape the working class and attain a position in the upper class. when gatsby was young he was nothing more than a salmon fisher and a clam digger. the turning point in his life is when he meets dan cody, who allows gatsby to work for him. as gatsby works with cody he gets accustomed to the luxurious life style, and is taught to idealize wealth. after the great war, gatsby goes into illegal business: he works with a man who has fixed the world tennis cup, and they own a chin of pharmacies that sell grain alcohol over the counter at times when all alcohol is prohibited. another ideal of gatsby is the pursuit of perfection, and so he begins to revolutionize his own character to achieve perfection in himself in order to have daisy. not only is gatsby trying to reach perfection but he is also trying to attain a place in the upper class. in order to impress his love he needs something more than just lavish items. gatsbys last and the most important ideal is the pursuit of daisy, who gatsby was seeing before the war. she said that she would wait but instead she married into the upper class. gatsby devises a plan to get daisys attentionhe throws a colossal party every weekend and he asks all his guests if they know daisy or her whereabouts. gatsby gets lucky when he finds out that his friend, nick, is also daisys cousin, nick sets up a meeting between the two. after numerous encounters gatsby finally asks daisy to leave her husband and marry him instead. it is not in the end does gatsby finally realize thathis car, his mansion and everything else he has done is not enough to persuade daisy to leave her husband tom, who is in the upper class and is extravagantly wealthy. for daisy, staying in the upper class is far more important than love or even her own happiness. gatsby has a strong desire for self-actualization, changing his name from james gatz to jay gatsby to represent his reinvention of himself. his relentless quest for daisy demonstrates that gatsby has an extraordinary ability to transform his hopes and dreams into reality. this talent for self-invention is what gives gatsby his quality of “greatness”. gatsby reveals himself to be an innocent, hopeful young man who stakes everything on his dream and, not realizes that his dreams are unworthy of him. “gatsby invests daisy with an idealistic perfection that she cannot possibly attain in reality and pursues her with a passionate zeal that blinds him to her limitations.” (phillips, 2007: 32-34)“gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. it eluded us then, but thats no mattertomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms fartherand one fine morningso we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” (fitzgerald, 2005: 224)these words conclude the novel, returning to the theme of the significance of the past to dreams of the future, here represented by the green light, which focuses on the struggle of human beings to achieve their goals by both transcending and recreating the past. yet humans prove themselves unable to move beyond the past: in the metaphoric language used here, the current draws them backward as they row forward toward the green light. this past functions as the source of their ideas about the future (epitomized by gatsbys desire to recreate 1917 in his affair with daisy) and they cannot escape it as they continue to struggle to transform their dreams into reality. while they never lose their optimism (“tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther”), they expend all of their energy in pursuit of a goal that moves ever farther away. this apt metaphor characterizes both gatsbys struggle and the american dream itself. for dreams, gatsby lived. for dreams, gatsby died. gatsby keeps himself as a dreamer in a dreamless world. gatsby does not follow the advice “when in rome, do as the romans do”, so he is not given a chance to live. but the dust of the world could not cover him all over and diminish him. he is forever shinning. his illusion makes him great. his illusion is his most valuable possession.1.2 the dramatic narrator nickfitzgerald has a very unique way to arrange his novel. the first chapter of the great gatsby does not tell us where we are going. it raises many subjects, and part of the problem of reading the text is finding the connection between dialogues. the observer-narrator is an important central character in a novel, through whom the author tells the story in the first-person narration. as “the central concept of the analysis of narration”, the narrator is familiar with different characters to different degrees. as a witness, the narrator tells about what he sees and hears. in the novel of the great gatsby, the narrator nick carraway is placed as an observer, through his gradually increasing knowledge of the facts the reader can follow the story and feel its significance. “the interest in the story is constantly being increased by the process of nicks discovery, and thus the interpretation is converted into a constantly expanding aspect of the actual narration.” (gao mei, 2007: 55) nicks qualification as a sympathetic listener is carefully established at the beginning of this novel. nick represented the middle class standard of judgment, because, according to his own narration, nicks family had a quite satisfactory economic and social foundation: “my family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle western city for three generations. the carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that were descended from the dukes of buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfathers brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the civil war, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.” (fitzgerald, 2005: 4)nick can take care of himself, plan for the development of his career, and show sociability to and concern for others. he is a young man from minnesota who, after being educated at yale and fighting in world war i, goes to new york city to learn the bond business. honest, tolerant, and inclined to reserve judgment, nick often serves as a confidant for those with troubling secrets. after moving to west egg, a fictional area of long island where is home to the newly rich, nick quickly befriends his next-door neighbor, the mysterious jay gatsby. as daisy buchanans cousin, he facilitates the rekindling of the romance between her and gatsby. the great gatsby is told entirely through nicks eyes, his thoughts and perceptions shape and color the story.“nick is in a strategic position half inside and half outside the action in order to put together bits of the story of gatsby and daisy.” (gao mei, 2007: 55) he attempts to bring them together again after five years of separation, and thus step by step becomes involved in gatsbys story. he ends the story by burying gatsby, showing himself as a critical factor to define the structure of the novel. insofar as nick plays a role inside the narrative, he evidences a strongly mixed reaction to life on the east coast, one that creates a powerful internal conflict that he does not resolve until the end of the book. on one hand, nick is attracted to the fast-paced, fun-driven lifestyle of new york. that seemed to show that he is also pursuing an illusory thing. but unlike gatsby, he does not dive headfast into the pursuit of his dream. he does not even admit that he is a dreamer. otherwise, he shouldnt have been amazed by gatsbys dream. on the other hand, he finds that lifestyle grotesque and damaging. “thats my middle westthe street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty darki see now that this has been a story of the west, after alltom and gatsby, daisy and jordan and i, were all westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to eastern life.” (fitzgerald, 2005: 219)the above sentences show that nick realizes for the first time that although his story is set on the east coast, the western character of his acquaintances (“some deficiency in common”) is the source of the storys tensions and attitudes. after witnessing the unraveling of gatsbys dream and presiding over the appalling spectacle of gatsbys funeral, nick realizes that the fast life of revelry on the east coast is a cover for the terrifying moral emptiness that the valley of ashes symbolizes. “even when the east excited me most, even when i was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, s