英语本科毕业论文-A Preliminary Analysis of Gatsbys Funeral in the Great Gatsby.doc

A Preliminary Analysis of Gatsbys Funeral in the Great Gatsby Introduction Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald who was born in 1896 and died in 1940 was an author of novels and short stories in American. He came from a poor family in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. He is also a member of the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s. In 1920, his first novel This Side of Paradise was published, which made him famous. Later, he finished three novels, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night and The Great Gatsby. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories, like Flappers and Philosophers, Tales of the Jazz Age and All the Sad young Men. But his most famous novel was The Great Gatsby. The publication of this novel decided his position in American literature, because it criticized the upper class’s selfishness and peremptoriness like Tom, and suggested that the reasons that lead to Gatsby’s tragedy were his illusion about life and love and the lack of cognition about the upper class. In this novel, the author successfully molded an ambitious but innocent figure Gatsby. “Fitzgerald was one of the great stylists in American literature. T. S. Eliot read The Great Gatsby three times and concluded that it was ‘the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James’ ”(Chang Yaoxing, 1990:292) This essay will analyze Gatsby’s funeral from the perspective of humanity, love and friendship. Gatsby is a person who lived a luxurious life before his death. But when he died, people refused to come to his funeral, which reflected people’s indifference and coldness. Daisy that he loved for his lifetime escaped with her husband. Nick was the only one that left to arrange everything. The paper consists of five parts. The first part briefly introduces the author and the novel. The second part will introduce