【文章內(nèi)容簡介】 rald had an imaginative sense of the experience of the 1920’s, who was indeed a writer so closely related to his time. He was in danger of being wholly absorbed by his sense of it and of writing books that would not survive it.”( Eble Kenneth, 1973:100) Fascinated by the content of the American dream, F. Scott Fitzgerald employed what he knew and what he had, either directly or indirectly, experienced in postwar America to dramatize the disillusion that he felt amid the American greatness. The Writing Background Among American writers in the 1920s, F. Scott. Fitzgerald is crowned with the most incredible achievement in the United States. His masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, conjures up the image of the roaring twenties, the age of flapper and the Jazz Age. Its writing background was in the 1920s in America which was a time of carefree prosperity, isolation from the world’s problems, bewildering social change and a feverish pursuit of pleasure. The decade is often referred to as the Jazz Age. America had just e out of the First World War, one of the bloodiest and most violent episodes in this nation’s history. The protagonist, Jay Gatsby, a poor young man, falls in love with a rich girl while he is serving as an officer in the army during the First World War. She loves him but marries someone else when she has given up on his ing back to her. A few years later, he bees rich and tries to persuade her to leave her husband for him. She nearly does, but instead stays with her husband. She kills her husband’s mistress in an automobile accident. But the dead woman’s husband, deceived into thinking that Gatsby is responsible, kills Gatsby and then himself. F. Scott. Fitzgerald bitterly portrays the lamentable scenes he catches in the course of ethical and cultural collapse through disillusion of the American Dream. In The Great Gatsby, there is a metaphor for an entire era when he portrays Gatsby’s world as an endless extravagant party, in which flappers seek frenetic pleasure. Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is a parody of the American dream, because in the experience of Jay Gatsby we have the corruption of the dream itself, that is, the traditional devotions wasted on spiritual gumdrops and material trivialities.4 Gatsby and his American Dream Gatsby and his Fortune DreamIt is the American culture that teaches Gatsby to exert himself to “go ahead” in the world. He dreames to bee a great man. As a boy, Gatsby has high aspirations. He is not content with things as they are. Trying to build up family fortunes and reach his goal, Gatsby works out a schedule in studies. He forces himself to get up early every morning and then exercise with dumbbells and wallscaling. The schedule and the resolve are nearly the same as what Benjamin Franklin wrote in his Autobiography which are also an echo of typical Benjamin Franklin’s resolve concerning thrift, health and the goal of advancement. In the schedule, we discover the roots of Gatsby’s transcendental vision and it indicates one of the suggestions throughout the novel that Gatsby’s dream is deeprooted in the American dream. However, the young Gatsby is nothing.At the age of seventeen, Gatsby meets Dan Cody on the Lake Superior. Dan Cody, a fifty years old man, is very rich from his many gold and silver mines in Mexico. Then Cody does business in Montana and accumulates millions of properties. Actually he is a typical playboy who brings the couth and bad habits of border brothel and hotel to the eastern coast areas. When Gatsby makes acquaintance with Cody, Cody is squandering what he earned in his youth which goes against with Gatsby’ dream, but Gatsby admires him. Under the influence of Cody, Gatsby’s thoughts and pure dream begin to deteriorate. Then Gatsby goes to the service, he falls in love with wealthy Daisy. Daisy eventually marries Tom Buchanan because of his status and money. However, the love failure does not let him frustrated and depressed. On the contrary, it stimulates his fighting spirit. He finds out what he wants to be. His ideals include money, a good job, a beautiful car, a mansion, an ideal wife and so on, among which money is the material base. As everyone knows, one can do nothing without money. Then Gatsby’s dream has material change and at that time, he is extremely hollow and depraved. In order to make more money, Gatsby connives with gangland and tries all dirty means. In a few years, he changes from riches to rags through bootlegging. Then he spends the bulk of his energy acquiring wealth and appearing wealthy to prove that his dream has e true. First, Gatsby changes his name when he gets rich, for he doesn’t want others to know his hard experience in the past and he is afraid that people like Tom may look down upon him. So he constructs a new identity for himself because he is unfortable with his actual background. Then he moves into Long Island, east of New York which is divided in the novel by a courtesy bay into two eggshaped islands—East egg and West egg. They are dissimilar in every particular detail except in shape and size. The bay is a line of demarcation which separates the upper class from the lower class. The very rich live in big mansions in East egg while the poor and middle class inhabit in small and shabby houses in West Egg. Here the places where lives can show off his social status. One of the most fantastic descriptions in the novel is about his luxurious mansion which is also another way to appear wealthy. Compared with the Buchanan’s cheerful red–andwhite Georgian colonial mansion inherited from their noble ancestors, Gatsby’s house is simply a factual imitation of the Hotel de Ville in Normandy. In order to show off his great fortune, Gatsby builds a house by imitating the old aristocratic style. What’s more, Gatsby’s mansion is sparking under thin beard of raw ivy. This suggests his desire of incorporating into the upper class. Besides the colossal mansion, Gatsby is also note