The failure of dreamsThe comparative study of The Great Gatsby and Heart of Darkness 英语毕业论文.doc

The failure of dreams—The comparative study of The Great Gatsby and Heart of Darkness 1. Introduction Joseph Conrad was born Tozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, in the Polish Ukraine. He studied English when he was twenty-one years old. In 1889, he began his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, and began actively searching for a way to fulfill his boyhood dream of traveling to the Congo in 1890, and his experiences in the Congo came to provide the outline for Heart of Darkness. He was ill when he was in Africa, then he returned to England to recover. He returned to sea twice before finishing Almayer’s Folly in 1894 and wrote several other books, including one about Marlow called Youth: A Narrative before beginning Heart of Darkness in 1898. Conrad’s works, Heart of Darkness in particular, provides a bridge between Victorian values and the ideals of modernism. These novels rely on traditional ideas of heroism, which are under constant attack in a changing world and in places far from England. Heart of Darkness suggests that this is the natural result when men are allowed to operate outside a social system of checks and balances: power, especially power over other human beings, inevitably corrupts. Heart of Darkness is a narrative about the difficulty of understanding the world beyond the self, about the ability of one man to judge another. This novel reinforces the novella’s central themes of hypocrisy, absurdity and unrealistic. Although Conrad and Fitzgerald lived in different age, Fitzgerald’ novel, The Great Gatsby also reflected the same theme. Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. His family was considered socially prominent and poor. In World War I, he fell hopelessly in love with Zelda, a beautiful and rich girl. In 1919, Fitzgerald was determined to win success, fame, and Zelda. He took a job with an advertising agency and worked on short stories. Eventually his first novel, This Side of Paradise, was accepted for publication. In 1922 he