毕业论文-The Art of Symbolism in the Great Gatsby.doc

The Art of Symbolism in the Great Gatsby 1. Introduction 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 color of American dollar bills, which burns at the end of Daisy’s dock, the references to the elements - land, sea and earth - over which Gatsby claims mastery, the contrast between “East” and “West”), or its subtle use of the personalized 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 archetypal tragic figure, the epitome of idealism and innocence which strives for order, purpose and meaning in a ch