【正文】 g” of the postwar boom years, he also foresaw its doom and failure. Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul. In his younger age,he attended a private school in New Jersey, then he went to Princeton University. Academic difficulties forced him out of Princeton midway through his junior year。 he 1 Chen Mei, Jin Yue. Journal of Qiqihar University (Phi amp。 Soc Sci), September. 20xx. 2 Du Yongxin. Joural of Sichuan International Studies University, Jan . , 20xx. 3 Xie Jiashum. Joural of Tangshang Polytechnic College, Vol. 13, No. 3, 20xx. 5 returned the following fall but he left his college permanently in 1917 and decided to join the army, as World War I neared its end. While stationed in Montgomery, Alabama, he met and immediately fell in love with a wild seventeenyearold beauty named Zelda Sayre. 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 plete his masterpiece: The Great Gatsby. 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 o f the book and Zelda?s mental breakdowns, he drank to excess and grew seriously ill, died in 1940. Fitzgerald is a famous American modern writer and is called “spokesman in the Jazz Age”. And his greatness lies in the fact that he found intuitively in his personal experience the embodiment of the nation and created a myth out of American life. The story of The Great Gatsby is a good illustration. T. S. Eliot read The Great Gatsby three times and concluded that it was “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.”1 The main theme of The Great Gatsby meditates on 1920s American as a whole, in particular the break up of the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material . Fitzgerald positions the characters of The Great Gatsby as emblems of these social trends. 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. And, Daisy, the only heroine, who relates with the other characters, has a perfect vantage point in the story she is Gatsby’ s lover, Nick’ s cousin, Tom’ s wife, and all three are closely linked because of her. Besides, The Great Gatsby is also an 1 T. S. Eliot. Letter to Scott Fitzgerald . New York: New York Press, 1925. 6 autobiographical novel. Fitzgerald bines his experience with the male characters, such as Gatsby, Nick and Tom showing his own experience, life and dream. 2. The Male Characters’ American Dream The Great Gatsby is a novel that illustrates the society in the 1920s and the associated beliefs, values and dreams of the American people at that time. These beliefs, values and dreams can be summed up be what is termed the “American Dream”: a dream of money, wealth, prosperity and the happiness that supposedly came with the booming economy and getrichquick schemes that formed the essential underworld of American upperclass society. Scott Fitzgerald illustrates the American Dream and the “foul dust” or the carelessness of a society that floats in the wake of this dream. According to the characters? respective expectation, it can be seen that the American Dream is not confined to one social class or type of person, but to the whole nation, everyone. . The Tragic Hero Gatsby In the novel, Gatsby reveals himself to be an innocent, hopeful young man who stakes everything on his dream, not realizing that his dream is unworthy of him. To Gatsby, his dream is of spiritual reunion with Daisy, but his prior dream is wealth. He thinks that wealth can solve all his problems: time, Daisy, and love. “?Can?t repeat the past?? he cried incredulously. ?Why of course you can!??? ?I?m going to fix everything just the way it was before,? he said , nodding determinedly. ?She?ll see.?” (Fitzgerald 20xx: 148) In the novel, Gatsby uses the most lavish party, sumptuous mansion, and geous machine to impress Daisy. And the green light, situated at the end of Daisy?s East Egg dock, represents Gatsby?s hopes and dreams for the future. Gatsby associates it with Daisy. “?If it wasn?t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,? said Gatsby. ?You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock..? 7 Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.” (Fitzgerald 20xx: 125) In fact, the green light stands for the achievements achieved by Gatsby to some extent. It leads Gatsby to go after the future, the glorious phantasm in his ideal world, not only the love for Daisy. However, Gatsby? dream is bound to fail. On the one hand, he acquires immense wealth through criminal activities, for instance, bootlegging. “?He and this Wolfsheim go and sold grain alcohol over the counter.? ” (Fitzgerald 20xx: 179) This is the opposite idea of the American Dream, which states that only the good, virtuous and hard working are rewarded. On the other hand, he held an unrealistic view of life and how he could recreate the past. His dreams has distorted in the reality, when his rationality realizes that the image of life and of Daisy does not coincide with the real life version. The devastating e