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The Great Gatsby and American dream Abstract : critics have always been holding different attitudes towards the debate that whether Fitzgerald criticized American dream in The Great Gatsby. By analyzing the tragedy of Gatsby, we will see Fitzgerald’s ambivalence towards American dream. One hand, the author hated the corruption and villainy of it, on the other hand, he was obsessed with its charms and luxuries. Key words : American dream The Great Gatsby tragedy American dream refers to the pursuit of the equality, freedom and corporeal property. American dream has always been one of the most popular motifs in American literature. As a spirit came into being as America was founded, American dream became stronger and stronger in American people’s mind. It seemed American people can get what they want by work. This kind of spirit encourages American people generation by generation and prompts America to become the most developed country and own the most wealth in this world. Nowadays, America is the super power, however, America dream has more connotations as time goes by. And it has different meanings in different times. The impression of American dream in the early 18 th century is that America is a country of freedom and opportunities which people could enjoy equally. At that time, the immigrants were puritans from Europe. Among them, British puritans and peasants were the most typical ones. When they arrived in America, their desires for political equality were strong, so the demand for democracy had been accomplished. Thus, the equal rights became the connotation of American dream in that period. As gold rush in the late 18 th century and the early 19 th century began to emerge, some lucky dogs made fortune over night, this gold rush became a legend and promoted the immigration rush. American dream was decorated with the color of gold. But after the Civil War, especially after 1990s, America began to industrialize. American dream had new connotations. Most people thought that it means to pursue wealth and money. They got successful by hard work and endeavor. People gave positive meaning, wisdom and endeavor for American. Since then, America experienced a long time of rapid expansion, more and more people went to America to find their own dreams. However, after the WWI，the connotation of American dream had been changing gradually, because of the post war stability and prosperity, the atmosphere seemed to be harmonious, people thought that they didn’t need war any more, young people turned to be debauched. They compensate themselves in the luxurious lifestyles. Young people didn’t believe in risks and hard work any more, they began to get much wealth by promotion strategies which included cheat and illegal methods. Most of them treated wealth as the only standard to comment whether a person was successful or not. But the pursuit of wealth and ideal cannot be balanced, the broken dream is the necessary ending of the American dream. Gatsby is the typical representative that succeed in the process of pursuing for American dream. This novel’s greatness embodies that it concerns the individuals in America and finally associates them with the whole American nation. Fitzgerald figured a classical tragedy, and it is a tragedy of the American dream. Gatsby is doomed to lose and finally reduced to a tragic character. Because at the very beginning, Gatsby’s love for Daisy is partly based on the glamour he associates with the money, and he pursues her by becoming wealthy himself. His passion for Daisy blends with earlier desires for financial success going all the way back to the daily schedule he established as a boy. His dream is completely misguided. When they meet again, Gatsby become a rich man who is still innocent, but the girl—Daisy he pursues merely becomes his empty imagination with symbolistic meaning. So what Gatsby wants is not real Daisy, but the Daisy that figured, decorated and glorified in his imagination. This kind of imagination is beyond Gatsby’s ability and power, and it is also beyond the reality. Gatsby’s old flame becomes his spirit world. In his heart, Daisy is beautiful and innocent, and she represents all the merits in the upper class of America. Gatsby creates the perfect image of Daisy, and treat her as the avatar of dream to sacrifice himself. Gatsby pursue for money, but he dosen’t treat money as the final goal, he just wants to accomplish his love dream by using money. But Daisy’s preference for wealth is stronger than any love in her heart. Because all her sentiments has become into cold money. But it is money to decorate Daisy as a princess, and drive her away from the lives related with miscreant and insecurity. Although Gatsby makes money by illegal methods, his still has many merits in his characteristics. He is positive for his life and strong for his faith. He loves Daisy firmly, since romantic elements and innocent love always remain in his heart. No matter how precious Gatsby’s merits are, his romantic love still diverts from the reality and finally loses in the dirty society. Fitzgerald reveals the fact by Gatsby’s tragedy that it is not enough to only create corporeal property, the poverty of spirit can be occupied by the lack of moralities. But some critics argue that Gatsby is not a tragic character, since his death proves his greatness, and the title of this novel has no ironic meaning at all. So the author didn’t criticize American dream, on the contrary, the merits and spirits that Gatsby owns would never be destroyed, and they would come back into the large amount of American wealth. The critics also hold a point of view that in the process of pursuit of American dream, Gatsby’s dream has never broken, even thought he finally dies, his dream is still remained in his heart. As Gatsby dies with his American dream, we can see that the author has blends his ambivalent mentality into the novel. On one hand, just like Gatsby, Fitzgerald is attracted by Daisy’s beauty, but one the other hand, he is aware that the splendid appearance can never cover vulgarities and inanition. Gatsby’s unbroken dream reveals that American dream has powerful charms and lasting attraction, it influences American lives deeply. But this affection is not always positive, it is full of ambivalence and anxiety. The repeating referred “green light” in this novel is the symbol of American dream that everyone wants, and it is illusion and desire. But to some people, American dream is their faith. But individual’s future and fate are related with the surroundings, living in a world with corruption and corporeal property, it is nature for Gatsby to make his romantic love come true, and his dream is doomed to be buried in the cruel realities in Jazz Age and killed in the seductive trap of American society. It proves that Gatsby’s merits cannot protect him from the numb surrounding’s hurt, and also his dream cannot afford the heavy pressures in the reality. Gatsby is faithful to his dream about Daisy, even her betrayal cannot destroy his faith. Gatsby is the mirror of idealists who are loyal to dreams forever. Gatsby’s characteristics show the reasons for his death to some extent. But the world is changing, everyone should observe it using a developing mind. One should live in the reality, but not the illusion. However, Gatsby is on the opposite side. Maybe this is Gatsby’s greatness, but it is also his fatal defect. He is too romantic to find the valuable things to go with him. In 1920s, America society came into the stage of monopoly capitalism. The American society developed in a rapid speed, and economy was unprecedentedly prosperous. As American enjoyed the wealth, they became greed and epicurean. Money was the only goal which can be achieved by any means. However, the wealth brought void into people’s mind. So 1920s was a time of gastronomy, a time without any belief, a time for lost generation, and a time of tragedies. This novel has realistic meanings for Chinese readers. The things around us reveal that we are sharing the similar thoughts with the 1920s’ America, like extreme individualism and gastronomy. It seems that nothing can be more provocative than this current which is provoking foppish ,vanity and meaningless activities and is feeding all the greedy in the society. People begin to betray and lose their faith. They are all eager for large amount of money, as forgetting that we are all human beings with spirits. By learning the American literature, maybe we Chinese can find medicine to cure our ill society.

The Great GatsbyThe Great Gatsby was published in 1922 by F. Scott Fitzgerald. At first glance, the novel appears to be a simple love story, but further examination reveals Fitzgerald's masterful scrutiny of American society during the 1920s and the corruption of the American dream. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1926) is, at first sight, a novel about love, idealism and disillusionment. However, it soon reveals its hidden depths and enigmas. What is the significance of the strange "waste land" between West Egg and New York, where Myrtle Wilson meets her death, an alien landscape presided over by the eyes of T J Eckleburg whose eyes, like God's, "see everything"? And what are we to make of the novel's unobtrusive symbolism (the green light, the colour of American dollar bills, which burns at the end of Daisy's dock, the references to the elements - land, sea and earth - over which Gatby claims mastery, the contrast between "East" and "West"), or its subtle use of the personalised first narrator, the unassuming Nick Carraway? It is a novel which has intrigued and fascinated readers. Clearly, as a self-proclaimed "tale of the West", it is exploring questions about America and what it means to be American. In this sense Gatsby is perhaps that legendary opus, the "Great American Novel", following in the footsteps of works such as Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn. We will return to this aspect of the novel in more detail later on. However, we also need to be aware that it is a novel which has much to be say about more abstract questions to do with faith, belief and illusion. Although rooted in the "Jazz Age" which Fitzgerald is so often credited with naming, it is also a novel which should be considered alongside works like The Waste Land, exploring that "hollowness at the heart of things" which lies just below the surface of modern life. Eliot himself remarked that the novel "interested and excited me more than any new novel I have seen, either English or American, for a number of years". Viewed from more distant perspectives it is possible to see Gatsby as an archetypally tragic figure, the epitome of idealism and innocence which strives for order, purpose and meaning in a chaotic and hostile world. In this sense Gatsby contains religious and metaphysical dimensions: the young man who shapes a "Platonic vision of himself" and who endows the worthless figure of Daisy with religious essence, eventually passes away into nothingness, with few at the funeral to lament the passing of his romantic dream. This article is about the novel. For the film, TV and opera adaptations, see The Great Gatsby (disambiguation).The Great Gatsby Cover of the first edition, 1925. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald Country United States Language English Genre(s) Novel Publisher Charles Scribner's Sons Publication date April 10, 1925 Media type print (hardback & paperback) ISBN NA & reissue ISBN 0-7432-7356-7 (2004 paperback edition) The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published on April 10, 1925, it is set in Long Island's North Shore and New York City during the summer of 1922.The novel chronicles an era that Fitzgerald himself dubbed the "Jazz Age." Following the shock and chaos of World War I, American society enjoyed unprecedented levels of prosperity during the "roaring" 1920s as the economy soared. At the same time, Prohibition, the ban on the sale and manufacture of alcohol as mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment, made millionaires out of bootleggers and led to an increase in organized crime. Although Fitzgerald, like Nick Carraway in his novel, idolized the riches and glamor of the age, he was uncomfortable with the unrestrained materialism and the lack of morality that went with it.来自Wikipedia百科的介绍（书籍简介）：Although it was adapted into both a Broadway play and a Hollywood film within a year of publication, it was not popular upon initial printing, selling fewer than 25,000 copies during the remaining fifteen years of Fitzgerald's life. It was largely forgotten during the Great Depression and World War II. After its republishing in 1945 and 1953, it quickly found a wide readership and is today widely regarded as a paragon of the Great American Novel. The Great Gatsby has become a standard text in high school and university courses on American literature in countries around the world, and is ranked second in the Modern Library's list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century. Time included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005The Great Gatsby的情节总结（Wikipedia）：The story is presented as a recollection of Nick Carraway, a young man from a patrician Midwestern family. Nick graduated from Yale in 1915; after fighting in World War I and an unsatisfactory postwar return to the Midwest, he moved to New York City to "learn the bond business" in "the spring of twenty-two." Nick declares that, following his father's advice, he avoids judging people: a habit that has caused trouble, exemplified by events concerning a man named Gatsby.Nick explains that in 1922 he was renting an inexpensive bungalow sandwiched between two mansions in West Egg, a seaside community of wealthy parvenus on Long Island Sound. Directly across the bay was East Egg, inhabited by members of the "old aristocracy", including Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Daisy is Nick's second cousin once removed; Nick knew of her husband Tom, a celebrated polo player at Yale. Nick describes the Buchanans through a visit to their opulent East Egg mansion: although phenomenally wealthy, Tom's glory days are behind him; he is a brutish, overbearing dilettante and Daisy, although engaging, cheerful, and attractive, is pampered and superficial with a largely ignored three-year-old daughter. Nick detects a strain in the relationship and Daisy's friend Jordan Baker, a well-known lady golfer, tells him that Tom has a mistress in New York City.Tom offers Nick a lift to the city and on the way they stop at a shabby garage owned by George Wilson, where Nick is introduced to the owner's brassy wife, Myrtle Wilson. Her colorless husband George has no suspicion that she is Tom's mistress. Nick passively accompanies the couple to their urban love-nest, where Myrtle presides over a pretentious party that includes her sister Catherine. Catherine approves of the extramarital affair and informs Nick that both lovers cannot stand the people they married and would marry each other if Tom's wife was not a Catholic who "doesn't believe in divorce", something Nick knows to be untrue. Nick finds the evening increasingly unbearable but is unable to leave until Tom breaks Myrtle's nose in a spat. Nick, drunk, leaves with Chester McKee, a would-be artistic photographer. After a very strange night of drunkenness, Nick wakens to blearily go off to his job as a bond salesman.Nick's next-door neighbor is the wealthy and mysterious Jay Gatsby, who every other weekend throws lavish parties hosting hundreds of people. Nick receives a formal invitation from Gatsby's chauffer and attends. The party is wild and fun, but he finds that none of the guests know much about Gatsby and rumors about the man are contradictory. Many have never even met their host, as the parties are open and guests often attend uninvited. Nick runs into Jordan Baker, but they are separated while searching for Gatsby. A man strikes up a conversation with Nick, claiming to recognise him from the US Army's First Division during the Great War. Nick mentions his difficulty in finding their host and the man reveals himself to be Gatsby himself, surprising Nick, who had expected him to be older and not as personable. Gatsby invites Nick to more get-togethers, and an odd 'friendship' begins.One day Gatsby appears in a magnificent yellow roadster and drives Nick to New York City, irritating him with the odd statement that Jordan will be asking Nick for a favor on Gatsby's behalf. Gatsby then presents a clichéd description of his life as a wealthy dilettante and war hero to an incredulous Nick, but the latter is convinced when Gatsby displays a Montenegrin war decoration. Gatsby then introduces a bemused Nick to underworld figure Meyer Wolfsheim. Nick then sees Tom and tries to introduce Gatsby, but Gatsby disappears.Jordan reveals to Nick that Gatsby fell in love with Daisy before the war and hosts parties in the hope that she will visit. Gatsby has asked Jordan to ask Nick to get him a meeting with Daisy. Nick agrees: the reunion is initially awkward, but Gatsby and Daisy begin a love affair. An affair also begins for Nick and Jordan, but Nick knows of Jordan's shortcomings and predicts that their relationship will be superficial.Later, Daisy invites Gatsby and Nick over to her mansion and the three, accompanied by Tom and Jordan Baker, depart for a hotel in the city at Tom's suggestion. Tom also insists that he and Gatsby switch cars; he takes advantage of Gatsby's compliance by flaunting Gatsby's roadster to George Wilson. At the hotel, Tom eventually notices Gatsby's love for Daisy and, in front of Gatsby, Daisy, Nick, and Jordan, confronts Gatsby about his affair with Daisy. Gatsby urges Daisy to say that she never loved Tom; Daisy says that although she did love him, she still loved Gatsby as well. Tom mockingly tells Gatsby that nothing can happen between him and Daisy. Gatsby retorts that the only reason Daisy married Tom was because he (Gatsby) was too poor to afford to marry Daisy at the time. Tom is angered and for the second time in the novel he visibly loses his composure. Tom then alleges that Gatsby is a bootlegger and expresses his loathing of him. Gatsby tries to defend himself to Daisy, but Nick and Tom observe that he fails and that Daisy is now beyond his reach. Confident that he has bested Gatsby, Tom tells Daisy to drive off with Gatsby in Gatsby's car, while Tom takes his time getting home in the company of Nick and Jordan.The suspicions of George Wilson, husband of Tom's mistress Myrtle, have also been aroused and he too has been arguing with his wife. Myrtle runs outside only to be struck and killed by Gatsby's car, which is driven by Daisy. Daisy and Gatsby speed away. Later, Tom, Jordan, and Nick notice a commotion by the garage on their way to East Egg and stop. George Wilson, half-crazy with shock, rants about having seen a yellow car and Tom tells Wilson privately that the yellow car was not his (as he said earlier) but was Gatsby's, but Wilson does not seem to listen and Tom, Jordan, and Nick leave. The half-crazed Wilson, however, later makes a mental connection between the driver of the car and Myrtle's lover and resolves to pursue it.The following day Nick learns the truth about the accident while breakfasting with Gatsby by his pool. Gatsby is depressed, unsure of whether Daisy still loves him and hoping for a call from her. Seeing himself as Gatsby's closest friend, Nick advises Gatsby to leave for a week. "They're [Daisy, Tom, Jordan] a rotten crowd," Nick says, "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together." Gatsby smiles the irresistible smile that Nick describes as having "faced—or seemed to face—the whole world, then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor".Wilson appears at the Buchanan mansion with a gun, finding Tom packing to escape with Daisy. Tom, unaware of Daisy's culpability, names Gatsby as the driver of the car that killed Myrtle. Wilson finds Gatsby floating in his pool and kills him before committing suicide nearby.Gatsby's funeral devolves upon Nick, whose attempt to find other mourners is virtually fruitless; not even Gatsby's shady business associates will attend. Apart from Gatsby's servants and Nick, the only other mourners are "Owl Eyes" (a Gatsby party guest) and Gatsby's father, Mr. Gatz. Left in the past by his son, he shows Nick a well-worn photograph Gatsby sent him of his mansion and a notebook from Gatsby's youth that he feels illustrates his son's drive and ambition.Nick severs connections with Jordan (who claims to be engaged to another man), and, after a brief run-in with Tom, Nick returns permanently to the Midwest, reflecting on Gatsby's dreams and the sad and cyclical nature of the past.