了不起的盖茨比..ppt

《了不起的盖茨比》 弗朗西斯·司各特·基·菲茨杰拉德 * 英文简介 The 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 Fitzgeralds masterful scrutiny of American society during the 1920s and the corruption of the American dream. F. Scott Fitzgeralds 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 Gods, see everything? And what are we to make of the novels unobtrusive symbolism (the green light, the colour of American dollar bills, which burns at the end of Daisys 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 an