PART 2

教师进入正文讲解:

Q1: Historical background

A1: Fitzgerald’s world view in The Great Gatsby is, in part at least, of a piece with the spirit of the United States in the 1920s—a strange mixture of cynicism and outraged idealism, of despair and hysterical vitality. The primary reason was that the United States had just emerged from World War I, a war that had come as a surprise to most people. For the preceding two generations there had been a feeling that civilization was at last outgrowing war. Soon there would be no more wars. At the same time poets and philosophers yearned for the nobility and self-sacrifice that they believed war produced.

The United States for the first time had settled a conflict among the major powers of the world. The country had lost many young men, but unlike European nations it had not depleted the manpower of a whole generation. European economies were in ruins. The United States had grown wealthier during the war and after a brief depression was off on the greatest economic expansion in its history.

Average Americans at this time were opposed to war and to any further involvement with Europe. They were willing to experiment with new sexual freedom and to drink bootleg liquor, but politically they opposed any sort of governmental activity that might limit business freedom. When President Coolidge told them that the business of the country was business, they agreed wholeheartedly. For most Americans at this time getting rich seemed the natural purpose of life.

Q2: The “Lost Generation”

A2: The “Lost Generation” refers to a group of early-20th-century American writers, notably Earnest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hart Crane, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, E. E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, and T. S. Eliot, whose experiences in World War I undermined their belief in justice, morality, manhood, and love.

The term “Lost Generation” was coined by Gertrude Stein in a remark to Earnest Hemingway, and was then popularized by Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises and his memoir A Moveable Feast. The writers considered themselves “lost” because their inherited values could not operate in the postwar world and they felt spiritually alienated from a country they considered hopelessly provincial and emotionally barren. They were haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war, disillusioned with the world in general and unwilling to move into a settled life. At this point in time, America had become a great place to “go into some area of business.” However, the lost generation writers felt that America was not such a success story because the country was devoid of a cosmopolitan culture. Their solution to this issue was to pack up their bags and travel to Europe’s cosmopolitan cities, such as Paris and London. Here they expected to find literary freedom and a cosmopolitan way of life.

Q3 :Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald

A3: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 - December 21, 1940) is one of the greatest American novelists and short story writers, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is generally regarded as the spokesman of the 1920s, the peculiar decade that coined the postwar economic boom and the sense of spiritual disorientation. He was both a leading participant in the typically pleasure-seeking and money-making life of the 1920s, and a self-conscious writer with detached observation of it. Fitzgerald was considered a member of the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s. he finished four novels: This Side of Paradise(1920), The Beautiful and Damned(1922), The Great Gatsby(1925), and Tender Is the Night(1934). A fifth, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon(1941), was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with age and despair. He was the highest paid short story writer of his time and wrote 178 short stories in all, including Flappers and Philosophers(1920), Tales of the Jazz Age(1922), All the Sad Young Men(1926), Taps at Reveille(1935), and The Pat Hobby Stories(1962). Fitzgerald’s fiction reveals the hollowness of the American worship of riches and the unending American dreams of love, splendor and gratified desires. The Great Gatsby is his best novel which deals symbolically with the frustration and despair resulting from the failure of the American Dream. During the 1920s Fitzgerald enjoyed success, fame and wealth, while during the 1930s he tasted the bitterness. He was the most representative writer of fiction in the 1920s, the spokesman of the “Roaring 20s”. Fitzgerald was an able writer who recorded the changing manners, morals, and social environment of his time, but mostly about himself and his won problem. His private life with his wife Zelda became almost as celebrated as his novels. Fitzgerald was a realist in an old fashion. All his stories about morality, industry, and maturity. Fitzgerald’s clear, lyrical, colorful, witty style evoked the emotions associated with time and place. As a social historian Fitzgerald became identified with the Jazz Age: “It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,” he wrote in “Echoes of the Jazz Age”.

Q4: Writing Style

A4: (1)Fitzgerald’s style might be imagistic. His language is simple, graceful, precise, polished, full of images—concrete verbal pictures appealing to the senses. Fitzgerald tried to develop a unique language that would create an emotional response not only through its content, but many times through its sound and rhythm. The language, which Fitzgerald described as “blankets of excellent prose,” is characterized by the use of repetitive structures which redevelop ideas and situations through parallels and differentiation. His calculated use of colors in his stories, such as pink for Gatsby, yellow and white for Daisy, makes them appealingly symbolic.

(2)Fitzgerald was an able writer who recorded cinematic pictures to stand for the whole. In Chapters I to III of The Great Gatsby, for example, Fitzgerald lets three parties stand for the whole summer and for the contrasting values of three different worlds. He also lets small snatches of dialogue represent what is happening at each party. The technique is cinematic. The camera zooms in, gives us a snatch of conversation, and then cuts to another group of people. Nick serves almost as a recording device, jotting down what he hears.

Q5: Theme

A5: The Great Gatsby depicts a tragedy caused by the “American dream” and reveals the sharp social contradictions that lie behind the false prosperity of the American “Jazz Age” and the serious moral crisis faced by the “Lost Generation”. With Fitzgerald’s high sense of social responsibility, he showed readers the rise and fall of a new era to reveal the essence of American society.

Q6: Plot

A6: Gatsby is a poor youth from the Midwest. He fall in love with Daisy, a wealthy girl, but is too poor to marry her. The girl is them married to a rich young man, Tom Buchanan. Determined to win his lost love back, Gatsby engages himself in bootlegging and other “shady” activities, thus earning enough money to buy a magnificent imitation French villa. There he spreads dazzling parties every weekend in the hope of alluring the Buchanans to come. They finally come and Gatsby meets Daisy again, only to find that the woman before him is not quite the ideal love of his dreams. A sense of loss and disillusionment comes over him. Then Daisy kills a woman in an accident, and plots with Tom to shift the blame on Gatsby. So Gatsby is shot and the Buchanans escape.

Q7: Significance

A7: F. Scott Fitzgerald is recognized as a genius, the author of perhaps the greatest—and certainly the best known and loved—American novel of the 20th century. His life had “some sort of epic grandeur.” He was a hero with many flaws, but a hero. In a professional career of 20 years he wrote three of the great American novels (one of them unfinished) and a score of brilliant stories while afflicted with a host of troubles, many of his own making. He was honorable and generous. His words endure. F. Scott Fitzgerald created his own legends. His life frequently overshadows his work as he has become an archetypal figure or a cluster of overlapping archetypes: the drunken writer, the ruined novelist, the spoiled genius, the personification of the Jazz Age, the sacrificial victim of the Depression. These images were largely his own fault because he dramatized his success and failure. Loving attention, he embraced his symbolic roles. The glamour, the triumph, the euphoria, the heartbreak, and the tragedy of his life were genuine; but the most important thing is what he wrote. But it is impossible to dissociate a great writer from his work, and Fitzgerald was one of the most personal authors.

Q8: Introduction

A8: The excerpt is a part of Chapter III of the book. Jay Gatsby remains fundamentally a mystery. Few of the party-goers have met their host, and Gatsby stands aloof from his own celebration. He does not drink, he does not dance, he remains an observer. The man himself stands in stark contrast to the sinister gossip Nick has heard about him. The reader already knows that not everything about Gatsby is mere display: his books are real. The chapter also reinforces Nick’s position an objective and reliable narrator.