【正文】 r events was his meeting with a beautiful society girl Zelda Sayre. Born in a judge?s home in Montgomery Alabama, Zelda was always in want of large sum of money and wealth, both of reach is out of Fitzgerald?s reach at the time when both of them were deep in love with each other. Because of his humble birth and incapability of offering Zelda the life she had used to, Zelda soon left him alone. But a person like Fitzgerald was so obsessed in his love of Zelda that he did his greatest efforts to rewrite to gain her back. Fortunately, he made it. With his first novel This Side of Paradise published and overwhelmed the whole country, he was now able to declare his own reputation in America and his marriage 11 with Zelda, his love, also, the most expensive and precious prize of his life. In such a plex and plicated society, his attitude toward love was simple but sincere, only to discover that the reality could never be as fancy as he might think. Since he got Zelda, what he needed to do then is to try his best to pursue more to support her. The Fitzgeralds couldn?t wait to rush into the parties, luxuries and jazz world in New York to seek some reckless merrymaking. This was a proliferated period for Fitz and his wife. From this aspect, maybe he is much luckier than Gatsby in his book, who can only by illegal bootlegging or some other deals to assemble wealth, for Fitzgerald was regarded as “the angel of the twenties” and took the time to his legendary period. Admittedly, his writing enabled the couple an abundant life, which was meanwhile the pivot of his tragedy. This was the most glorious timing in the river of Fitzgerald?s life, response to the appeal of American dream, he became part of it and contributed himself to it. A nice dream awarded him an exquisite life for then. Driven by his nearly crazy pursuit of money, part of contemporary as well as his “American Dream”, alcohol was for a long time used as the trigger of his inspiration, which also, made him suffer the most, to some extent, a cause of his death. When it didn?t work anymore, he could only survive by writing cheap and vulgar scripts for Hollywood, steering totally away from the pure literature way. Finally, under multiple pressures and suffering, Fitzgerald got to the end of his life in 1940, representing the denouement of his dream of fortune, and love. 12 Fitzgerald’s Ration in the “Jazz Age” Despite Fitzgerald?s dream of love and fortune, he was at the same time a rational person in the “Jazz Age”, who had a calmed and delicate vision into the world. Seeing the unprecedented material assembling and messy hollowness of this age, not only did the situations but his rational reasoning were described in his masterpiece The Great Gatsby with the most deliberate and meticulous touch. Authors like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, though having built a reputation in the society with their outstanding talents, were still called by Gertrude Stein as “the lost generation”, which prehensively exposed the inner world of that “Jazz Age” to the outside one—they had nowhere to go and nothing to rely on. Beliefs, religions, disciplines were all regarded as nonsense, because avarice had prevailed in this city, thus leaving no space for anyone to have a second chance to think about their deeds and behaviors. This kind of symptom had found its full expression in Fitzgerald?s The Great Gatsby, in which lots of ideological problems were discussed, showing his intention to seek for truth, rather phantom or jazz or parties or fortune. Similar revealing can also be found in his debut novel This Side of Paradise: the new generation grew up found all the god is dead, all wars fought, people of all beliefs shaken. When majority people were trapped by the disintegration of an age, finding themselves confused by the differences and barriers between genuineness and falsehood, or between an integrated self and departed consciousness, Fitzgerald was sober enough to be an onlooker, searching for the real meaning of human life in their ideological cognition. Lionel 13 Trilling, a social and cultural had wondered the genuine self that one should be faithful to, so did Fitzgerald. At this time, he was awaken from his fascinated dream and turned to be a real person in a civilized society. Whenever you feel like criticising anyone he told me,just remember that all the people in this world havent had the advantages that you39。 21 3 Abstract The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest novels in Modern American literature. It is a highly symbolic meditation on the disintegration of the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess. On the 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 characters, Gatsby, Nick and Tom. He also uses the distinctive writing style to introduce the three major male characters. On the other hand, according to Fitzgerald?s personality and experience, the three male characters are generally considered being written autobiographically reflecting the different sides of the author?s characters, which attracts readers to some extent. Key words: American Dream, Daisy Buchanan, Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby 摘 要 《了不起的蓋茨比》是美國現(xiàn)代文學史上最優(yōu)秀的作品之一。 16 . Nick and Fitzgerald 6 . The Tragic Hero Gatsby 7 . The Ugly Upperclass Tom 8 3. Fitzgerald?s American Dream 10 Fitzgerald?s Ration in the “Jazz Age” 11 Fitzgerald?s Sense of Failure 18 5. Conclusion 此外，菲茨杰拉德還運用獨特的手法描述了這三個特殊的男性人物；通過對這三個人物與菲茨杰拉德的對照可以看出：作者從某種程度上說是在講述自己的經(jīng)歷，蓋茨比、尼克、湯姆實際上是作家個性特點三個不同側(cè)面的反映，這也是小說之所以成功的魅力所