菲茨杰拉德的代表作《了不起的盖茨比》为我们生动展示了二十世纪二十年代“爵士时代”的生活画卷，但在表面的繁华下又隐藏着浓浓的悲凉。《了不起的盖茨比》标志着菲茨杰拉德的最高成就。艾略特曾评论说菲茨杰拉德是继詹姆斯之后美国文学迈出的又一步，是美国现代文学史上最优秀的作品之一。
小说反思了一个空前繁荣、物质过剩时代的美国梦的破灭，展现了美国梦对人们日常生活的消极影响。另一方面，书中体现了美国梦对所有角色的影响。那时的人们对金钱有强烈的欲望，他们天真的以为幸福是构筑在金钱之上。对于整个美国来说盖茨比是个独特的例子，盖茨比个人的困境和失败实际上是整个美国的。这部小说讽刺了美国梦的虚幻和不真实，是不可能实现的。
本篇论文主要分析书中人物，特别是主要人物在美国梦传奇下的嘲讽与悲怆。毫无疑问，盖茨比的嘲讽与悲怆是不可避免的，在这种社会环境下，没有人能逃脱悲剧的命运，这不仅是盖茨比一个人的而是整个社会的嘲讽与悲怆。
关键词：美国梦；盖茨比；嘲讽及悲怆
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Great Gatsby shows us a vivid picture of the 1920s with its superficial prosperity and underlying sadness. The Great Gatsby, with its depiction of “the Jazz Age”, marks the highest point of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s artistic achievement. T. S. Eliot once concluded that it was the “first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James”. The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest novels in Modern American literature. It is a highly symbolic meditation on the disintegration of the American Dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess.
On one hand, Fitzgerald shows a running theme of how the American Dream affects all of the characters in The Great Gatsby. People of that time have strong mind of pursuing money. They innocently believe that happiness lies in wealth. The representation of Gatsby as unique to America signifies that Gatsby’s personal dilemma and failure are the dilemma and failure of American nation, thus satirizing the illusory nature of the American Dream and impossible to attain it.
This thesis will attempt to explore how the characters especially the title roles in this novel represent the irony and pathos to the legendry of the American Dream. Undoubtedly Gatsby’s irony and pathos is inevitable and nobody can escape from the tragic fate in this kind of society. In this novel, it is not only Gatsby’s irony and pathos but the irony and pathos of the whole American society.
Key words：American Dream；Gatsby；irony and pathos
Contents
1.1 Introduction of the novel 1
1.1.1 Plot 1
1.1.2 The background of the novel 1
1.1.3 The process of writing the novel 2
1.1.4 The influence of the novel 2
1.2 A brief introduction of F. Scott Fitzgerald 3
1.2.1 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life 3
1.2.2 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s influence 3
2.1 The meaning of the American Dream 4
2.2 The decline of the American Dream in the 1920s 4
2.3 Gatsby’s American Dream 5
2.3.1 To get wealth 6
2.3.2 To get back his lost love 7
3.1 Irony and pathos to Gatsby 9
3.1.1 Gatsby’s belief in the American Dream 9
3.1.2 Daisy’s unworthiness 9
3.1.3 Gatsby’s refusal to admit Daisy’s essence 11
3.1.4 The relation between Gatsby and other people 13
3.2 Irony and pathos to other characters 14
3.2.1 Daisy Buchanan 14
3.2.2 Tom Buchanan 15
3.2.3 Myrtle Wilson 15
3.2.4 George Wilson 16
3.2.5 The common people in the novel 16
1.1 Introduction of the novel
The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald and it is his masterpiece. It shows us a vivid picture of the 1920s with its superficial prosperity and underlying sadness. The failure of the American Dream and the crisis of value are well reflected in characters and the details of the novel.
The Oxford Companion to American Literature had said that The Great Gatsby was his finest novel, sensitive and symbolic treatment of themes of contemporary life related with irony and pathos to the legendry of the American Dream.
1.1.1 Plot
A young man named Nick Caraway, who came to New York City in spring of 1922. He became involved in the life of his neighbor at Long Island, Jay Gatsby, a very rich man, who entertained hundreds of guests at his party. Gatsby revealed to Nick, that he fell in love with Nick’s cousin Daisy before the war. At that time he was poor. However, Daisy married Tom Buchanan, a rich but boring man of good social position. He persuaded Nick to bring him and Daisy together again. “You can’t repeat the past,” Nick said to him. Gatsby tried to convince Daisy to leave Tom, who, in turn, revealed that Gatsby has made his money from bootlegging. So they asked Daisy whom she loved. Daisy began to sob helplessly and said she did love Gatsby once but she loved Tom too. Daisy, driving Gatsby’s car, hit and killed Tom’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson, unaware of her identity. Gatsby remained silent to protect Daisy. Tom told Myrtle’s husband Wilson it was Gatsby who killed his wife. Wilson murdered Gatsby and then committed suicide. Nick was left to arrange Gatsby’s funeral, attended only Gatsby’s father and one former guest. Nick returned to his Midwest home, reflecting on Gatsby’s dreams and the sad and cyclical nature of the past.
1.1.2 The background of the novel
The novel takes place following the First World War. American society enjoyed prosperity during the roaring 1920s. The American economy soared, bringing unprecedented levels of prosperity to the nation. Prohibition, the ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1919), made millionaires out of bootleggers. Sprawling private parties managed to elude police notice. The chaos and violence of World War I left America in a state of shock, and the generation that fought the war turned to wild and extravagant living to compensate. The traditional conservatism and timeworn values of the previous decade were turned on their ear, as money, wealth, and exuberance became the order of the day.
In this period, jazz music blossomed, the flapper redefined modern womanhood. The era was further distinguished by several inventions and discoveries of far-reaching importance, unprecedented industrial growth and accelerated consumer demand and aspirations. The Roaring Twenties was marked by a general feeling of discontinuity associated with modernity, a break with traditions. Everything seemed to be feasible through modern technology.
1.1.3 The process of writing the novel
With The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald made a conscious departure from the writing process of his previous novels. He started planning it in June 1922, after completing his play The Vegetable, and began composing it in 1923. Unlike his previous works, Fitzgerald intended to edit and reshape Gatsby thoroughly, believing that it held the potential to launch him toward literary acclaim. He told his editor Maxwell Perkins that the novel was a consciously artistic achievement and a purely creative work — not trashy imaginings as in his stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world. He added later, during the editing process, that he felt an enormous power in me now, more than he has ever had.
1.1.4 The influence of the novel
Written in 1925, The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest literary documents of this period. After it was republished in 1945 and 1953, it quickly found a wide readership and is today widely regarded as a paragon of the great American novel, and a literary classic. The Great Gatsby has become a standard text in high school and university courses on American literature in countries around the world and is ranked second in the Modern Library’s lists of the 100 best novels of the 20th century.
1.2 A brief introduction of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 — December 21, 1940) was an American author of novels and short stories. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the “Lost Generation”of the 1920s. He finished four novels, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender is the Night and his most famous, The Great Gatsby. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with despair and age.
1.2.1 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life
Fitzgerald was raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. Though an intelligent child, he did poorly in school and was sent to a New Jersey boarding school in 1911. Despite being a mediocre student there, he managed to enroll at Princeton in 1913. Academic troubles and apathy plagued him throughout his time at college, and he never graduated, instead enlisting in the army in 1917, as World War I neared its end.
There he met and fell in love with a wild seventeen-year-old beauty named Zelda Sayre. Zelda finally agreed to marry him, but her overpowering desire for wealth, fun, and leisure led her to delay their wedding until he could prove a success. With the publication of This Side of Paradise in 1920, Fitzgerald became a literary sensation, earning enough money and fame to convince Zelda to marry him.
However, Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and Fitzgerald battled alcoholism, which hampered his writing. He published Tender Is the Night in 1934, and sold short stories to The Saturday Evening Post to support his lavish lifestyle. In 1937, he left for Hollywood to write screenplays, and in 1940, while working on his novel The Love of the Last Tycoon, died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four.
1.2.2 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s influence
Fitzgerald was the most famous writer of 1920s America, an era that he dubbed “the Jazz Age”. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Chapter 2 American Dream
2.1 The meaning of the American Dream
America was described as a Dream of a Land with new opportunities and equal chances for everyone. In America one might hope to satisfy every material desire and thereby achieve happiness. It is deceptive because it proposes the satisfaction of all desire as an attainable goal and identifies desire with material. The American Dream is the firmly held belief that everyone has the opportunity to achieve their goals and become rich and prosperous if they only work hard enough.
The term “American Dream” was first used by James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America. The original idea of the American Dream is about moral values and the pursuit of happiness. But the pursuit of happiness was soon turned into the pursuit of wealth and ultimately to greed.
2.2 The decline of the American Dream in the 1920s
On the surface, The Great Gatsby is a story of the thwarted love between a man and a woman. The main theme of the novel, however, encompasses a much larger, less romantic scope. Though all of its action takes place over a mere few months during the summer of 1922 and is set in a circumscribed geographical area in the vicinity of Long Island, New York, The Great Gatsby is a highly symbolic meditation on 1920s America as a whole, in particular the disintegration of the American Dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess.
Fitzgerald portrays the 1920s as an era of decayed social and moral values, evidenced in its overarching cynicism, greed, and empty pursuit of pleasure. The decadent parties and wild jazz music epitomized in The Great Gatsby by the opulent parties that Gatsby throws every Saturday night resulted ultimately in the corruption of the American Dream, as the unrestrained desire for money and pleasure surpassed more noble goals. When World War I ended in 1918, the generation of young Americans who had fought the war became intensely disillusioned, as the brutal carnage that they had just faced made the Victorian social morality of early-twentieth-century America seem like stuffy, empty hypocrisy. The dizzying rise of the stock market after the war led to a sudden, sustained increase in the national wealth and a newfound materialism, as people began to spend and consume at unprecedented levels. A person from any social background could, potentially, make a fortune, but the American aristocracy — families with old wealth — scorned the newly rich industrialists and speculators. Additionally, the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, which banned the sale of alcohol, created a thriving underworld designed to satisfy the massive demand for bootleg liquor among rich and poor alike.
Fitzgerald positions the characters of The Great Gatsby as emblems of these social trends. Nick and Gatsby, both of whom fought in World War I, exhibit the newfound cosmopolitanism and cynicism that resulted from the war. The various social climbers and ambitious speculators who attend Gatsby’s parties evidence the greedy scramble for wealth. The clash between “old money” and “new money” manifests itself in the novel’s symbolic geography: East Egg represents the established aristocracy, West Egg the self-made rich. Meyer Wolfshiem and Gatsby’s fortune symbolize the rise of organized crime and bootlegging.
As Fitzgerald saw it (and as Nick explains in Chapter 9), the American Dream was originally about discovery, individualism, and the pursuit of happiness. In the 1920s depicted in the novel, however, easy money and relaxed social values have corrupted this Dream, especially on the East Coast. The main plotline of the novel reflects this assessment, as Gatsby’s dream of loving Daisy is ruined by the difference in their respective social statuses, his resorting to crime to make enough money to impress her, and the rampant materialism that characterizes her lifestyle. Additionally, places and objects in The Great Gatsby have meaning only because characters instill them with meaning: the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg best exemplify this idea. In Nick’s mind, the ability to create meaningful symbols constitutes a central component of the American Dream, as early Americans invested their new nation with their own ideals and values.
2.3 Gatsby’s American Dream
Rise from bed………………………………..6.00 A.M.
Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling……........6.15-6.30 ‘‘
Study electricity, etc……………………………7.15-8.15 ‘‘
Work……………………………………………8.30-4.30 P.M.
Baseball and sports……………………………..4.30-5.00 ‘‘
Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it ….5.00-6.00 ‘‘
Study needed inventions………………………..7.00-9.00 ‘‘
GENERAL RESOLVES
No wasting time at Shafter’s or [a name, indecipherable]
No more smoking or chewing
Bath every other day
Read one improving book or magazine per week
Save $5.00 {crossed out} $3.00 per week
Be better to parents (Fitzgerald, 2003: 231)
From the table in Chapter Nine, we know Gatsby did have an energetic schedule in his childhood, such as getting up at six in the morning, beginning to study electricity at a quarter past seven, and until seven to nine in the evening studying needed inventions. It seems that not a seconds to be lost. He also has a wonderful general resolves, which set strict demands on himself, such as not wasting time, no more smoking, read one improving book or magazine per week and save $500 per week. Anyway he was dreaming to better himself all the time in order that he could get rich some day. He believed he could achieve his dream by his efforts.
2.3.1 To get wealth
The title character of The Great Gatsby is a young man, around thirty years old, who rose from an impoverished childhood in rural North Dakota to become fabulously wealthy. However, he achieved this lofty goal by participating in organized crime, including distributing illegal alcohol and trading in stolen securities. From his early youth, Gatsby despised poverty and longed for wealth and sophistication — he dropped out of St. Olaf’s College after only two weeks because he could not bear the janitorial job with which he was paying his tuition.
One part of Gatsby’s ideal or his first dream is to get rich. He has been longing to get rich and stand out among rich people. In his youth he worships a wealthy and dissolute man named Dan Cody, who makes himself many times a millionaire. He is infatuated with Daisy because he is amazed at Daisy’s beautiful house and shining motor cars, and other aspects of an elegant life. All of her luxurious life makes him overwhelmingly aware of youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, and makes him think that the rich can be safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor. So Gatsby, full of drive, attempts to reach his goal of getting rich.
Besides becoming wealthy is the most important for love affair. Large fortune cannot have been obtained honestly. Gatsby did business with Wolfsheim, a gambler. Gatsby made lots of money also from distributing illegal alcohol and trading in stolen securities. Gatsby is sensitive and idealistic, almost divine in his dedication to his love and faith. After gotten money, Gatsby got luxurious possessions:
At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station-wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before. (Fitzgerald, 2003: 52)
What is more, he believes anything could buy in money. He thinks money can buy love and happiness, so it seems to him that dreams quite reasonable. But he never realizes this is a common dream. Tracing back the source of the dream we know it is a popular dream in America. It originates from the gold rush in American history. In that period, the bourgeoisie blows its own trumpet that American is a “golden world”. They say everyone has the same opportunity to make a fortune so long as he or she toils honestly.
2.3.2 To get back his lost love
Though Gatsby has always wanted to be rich, his main motivation in acquiring his fortune was his love for Daisy Buchanan, whom he met as a young military officer in Louisville before leaving to fight in World War I in 1917. Gatsby immediately fell in love with Daisy’s aura of luxury, grace, and charm, and lied to her about his own background in order to convince her that he was good enough for her. Daisy promised to wait for him when he left for the war, but married Tom Buchanan in 1919. Gatsby dedicated himself to winning Daisy back, and his acquisition of millions of dollars, his purchase of a mansion on West Egg, and his lavish weekly parties are all merely means to that end.
Daisy was the first nice girl Gatsby had ever known. Gatsby found her exciting desirable. It amazed him — he had never been in such a beautiful home before. Daisy came from wealthy family. At that time Gatsby was a penniless young man. He lied about his background to make her believe that he was worthy of her. As a matter of fact, he had no such facilities-he had no comfortable family standing behind him and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world. When Gatsby left for the war, though she cried and cried, Daisy married rich man Tom Buchanan, with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before.
Gatsby dedicated himself to winning Daisy back, making her the single goal of all of his dreams and the main motivation. Gatsby made his fortune through criminal activity, as he was willing to do anything to gain the social position he thought necessary to win Daisy. To Gatsby, Daisy represents the paragon of perfection — she has the aura of charm, wealth, sophistication, grace, and aristocracy.
He makes a lot of money and begins to implement his plans, step by step, to “buy” Daisy’s love. “The modesty of the demand shook me. He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths — so that he could ‘come over’ some afternoon to a stranger’s garden”( Fitzgerald, 2003: 105-106).
It’s hard to imagine a wealthy man who did illegal dealings and bootlegging could stick to pure love of his early youth for five years in such a materialistic society. Gatsby bought a house in West Egg, so that he could look across the bay to see Daisy’s house. By inviting people that came from everywhere to attend these parties, he only hoped that one day daisy would notice that and also came to attend them so that they could meet again and he could win daisy back, recovering the love he had lost.
Assuming that he can buy Daisy’s love by exhibiting his wealth, Gatsby becomes committed into using his money to impress Daisy. Though Gatsby makes a great effort for his American Dream, in the end his dream fails completely since the woman he loves is a corrupt product of modern society.
Chapter 3 Irony and pathos in the novel
3.1 Irony and pathos to Gatsby
In one sense, the title of the novel is ironic; the title character is neither “great” nor named Gatsby. He is a criminal whose real name is James Gatz, and the life he has created for himself is an illusion.
3.1.1 Gatsby’s belief in the American Dream
But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone — he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. (Fitzgerald, 2003: 29)
That green light was where Daisy lived. That light represents Gatsby’s hopes and dreams for the future. It is the symbol of Gatsby’s great dream, his love for Daisy, and attempt to make that love real.
Gatsby’s irresistible longing to achieve his dream, the connection of his dream to the pursuit of money and material success, the boundless optimism with which he goes about achieving his dream, and the sense of his having created a new identity in a new place all reflect the coarse combination of pioneer individualism and uninhibited materialism that Fitzgerald perceived as dominating 1920s American life.
Further, Gatsby impresses Nick with his power to make his dreams come true — as a child he dreamed of wealth and luxury, and he has attained them, although through criminal means. As a man, he dreams of Daisy, and for a while he wins her, too. In a world without a moral center, in which attempting to fulfill one’s dreams is like rowing a boat against the current, Gatsby’s power to dream lifts him above the meaningless and amoral pleasure-seeking of New York society.
3.1.2 Daisy’s unworthiness
As a young woman in Louisville before the war, Daisy was courted by a number of officers, including Gatsby. She fell in love with Gatsby and promised to wait for him. However, Daisy harbors a deep need to be loved, and when a wealthy, powerful young man named Tom Buchanan asked her to marry him, Daisy decided not to wait for Gatsby after all.
Gatsby’s decision to take the blame for Daisy demonstrates the deep love he still feels for her and illustrates the basic nobility that defines his character. Disregarding her almost capricious lack of concern for him, Gatsby sacrifices himself for Daisy. The image of a pitiable Gatsby keeping watch outside her house while she and Tom sit comfortably within is an indelible image that both allows the reader to look past Gatsby’s criminality and functions as a moving metaphor for the love Gatsby feels toward Daisy.
The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged. (Fitzgerald, 2003: 24)
This is the impression that Daisy left Nick when nick met Daisy at the first time. Nick Caraway is sensitive and intelligent; he alters his evaluation of others as he learns more about them. He preserves a rational mind that makes him also realize what is wrong with Gatsby. Gatsby, on the other hand, is idealistic and romantic. His personality remains unchanging and static. His view of life remains one-sided and unreal at the end. For Gatsby, the material world has always been unreal and only the world of dreams essentially real. Born in a society where inexhaustible possibilities seemed to dwell in the white palaces of the rich, Gatsby saw their accumulated booty as the instruments of their secret charm. His dream is timeless and incorruptible, but the woman and the world to which he makes his dream are both mortal and corrupted. So his dream is doomed to fail.
“Was she killed?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so; I told Daisy I thought so. It’s better that the shock should all come at once. She stood it pretty well.” (Fitzgerald, 2003: 192)
According to the dialogue, it reflects Daisy was cold-blooded and ruthless. From the above, we know the real Daisy. But Gatsby still loves her. This is the main reason why Gatsby’s dream cannot come true. When Gatsby fell in love with Daisy, he knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn’t realize just how extraordinary a “nice” girl could be. She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby — nothing. After the war, Gatsby got rich, but Daisy got married. He only got several times to be with her and know her. The green light where his lost lover lived is dim and far away. He never knew what his dream and his hope really were.
In reality, however, Daisy falls far short of Gatsby’s ideals. She is beautiful and charming, but also fickle, shallow, and bored. Nick characterizes her as a careless person who smashes things up and then retreats behind her money. Daisy proves her real nature when she chooses Tom over Gatsby in Chapter 7, then allows Gatsby to take the blame for killing Myrtle Wilson even though she herself was driving the car. Finally, rather than attend Gatsby’s funeral, Daisy and Tom move away, leaving no forwarding address.
To Gatsby, Daisy is his true love. Daisy is in love with money, ease, and material luxury. She seems to love Gatsby, but not of sustained loyalty or care.
3.1.3 Gatsby’s refusal to admit Daisy’s essence
Gatsby was a good man: he was lenient and understanding to common people, honest and helpful to his friends, faithful and persistent to his love. He did well both in army and in business, though his business was unlawful. The only reason was it’s just a way to achieve his life goal, to win his love. On the other hand, Daisy, the girl Gatsby persuaded all his life, was not worthy. She was the representative of money worshipers; even her voice is full of money. Maybe she loved Gatsby once, but her love was not real, not persistent. As Gatsby went to war, she kept silent a while, but she became active soon. She was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men. Because she wanted her life shaped immediately — and the decision must be made by some forces of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality that was cloze at hand. So naturally, she married to wealthy Tom. Five years later, she would like to love Gatsby again because at this time Gatsby was wealthy and famous. When she was forced to make a choice between Tom and Gatsby, she didn’t know who would give her more wealthy, more comfortable life. As Tom told her that Gatsby got rich out of bootlegger, she knew what kind of future would be like if she chose Gatsby. So she stood by her husband’s side naturally. To her, money was the basis. Pleasure-seeking was her living rule. Daisy had a fair body, more fair dress, but she was a wicked and selfish woman. Gatsby took such a woman as a goal in his life. We can’t say this is not sad.
But in fact Gatsby also unconvinced about the love between him and Daisy. The following part depicts that Daisy was different from Gatsby’s imagination:
“She didn’t like it,” he insisted. “She didn’t have a good time.”
He was silent, and I guessed at his unutterable depression. “I feel far away from her,” he said. “It’s hard to make her understand.” […] “And she doesn’t understand,” he said. “She used to be able to understand. We’d sit for hours —” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 2003: 147)
“Of course she might have loved him just for a minute, when they were first married — and loved me more even then, do you see?”
Suddenly he came out with a curious remark.
“In any case,” he said, “it was just personal.” (Fitzgerald, 2003: 203)
After trying to impress Daisy with his mansion and his wealth, Gatsby discovered that he no longer understood Daisy.
“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” […] First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we’d been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time. (Fitzgerald, 2003: 206)
Nike told Gatsby his opinion about Tom and Daisy, these so called upper society people. Gatsby also agree with him. We can know that Gatsby had realized Tom and Daisy were what kinds of people.
Gatsby turned to me rigidly: “I can’t say anything in his house, old sport.”
“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of — I hesitated.”
“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.
That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money — that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbal’s song of it. (Fitzgerald, 2003: 160)
Even so Gatsby was willing to take the blame for daisy after a car accident happened in which Myrtle, Tom’s mistress, was killed. Gatsby knew Daisy more deeply than Nick, but he refused to admit. Because Daisy means his dream and denied Daisy means denying his dream. That is, Gatsby makes Daisy his dream because his heart demands a dream, not because Daisy truly deserves the passion that Gatsby feels for her. Although the reader is able to perceive this degradation, Gatsby is not. For him, losing Daisy is like losing his entire world. He has longed to re-create his past with her and is now forced to talk to Nick about it in a desperate attempt to keep it alive. Even after the confrontation with Tom, Gatsby is unable to accept that his dream is dead. Though Nick implicitly understands that Daisy is not going to leave Tom for Gatsby under any circumstance, Gatsby continues to insist that she will call him.
3.1.4 The relation between Gatsby and other people
The other aspect the author described Gatsby’s irony and pathos lays on the relation between Gatsby and other people, thereby described the thin human feelings at that time in American society.
On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages alongshore, the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby’s house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn.
“He’s a bootlegger,” said the young ladies, moving somewhere between his cocktails and his flowers. “One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil. Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crystal glass.” (Fitzgerald, 2003: 81)
At the beginning of the book, the author wrote about Gatsby’s luxurious mansion and his parties. Gatsby was generous to people, his parties were full of champagne, flowers, fruits, music etc-everything everyone wanted. Parlous people cowed to his parties, most of them without invitation. But at his parties, drinking his champagnes, enjoying his expenses, people gossiped him as he killed a man once and he was a German spy during the war.
“But I can still read the grey names, and they will give you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him”(Fitzgerald, 2003: 81). Though this was the time when Gatsby was rich and had a fair social position, nobody was thankful or respects him sincerely, he nearly had no real friends.
What’s worse, at the ending of the book, when Gatsby was shot dead, the whole mansion like a dead place, Nick has invited some people to come to Gatsby’s funeral. Except Nike no one came; no one cared about him; no one would like to take part in his funeral. Mr. Wolfshiem who was made rich in business by Gatsby, denied Gatsby’s help, and claimed that he founded Gatsby and helped him in business. When Nike asked him to participate Gatsby’s funeral, he refuses with the reason he can’t get mixed up in it. Their friendship for years died with Gatsby’s death, because it was useless for Wolfshiem. Another man who took part in Gatsby’s parties often called up after his death just for a pair of shoes he had left there before and refused to be present at the funeral. These people are all Gatsby’s so-called friends. Gatsby’s generous parties have not brought him even one friend. What’s more, Daisy, once Gatsby’s lover, the real killer, hadn’t sent a message or a flower. Gatsby’s funeral was gloomy and miserable, only his father, the minister, Nick and a postman. It’s a record of human coldness. At the progress of the funeral, one person who used to drink at Gatsby’s parties came to the graveyard; he was very surprised and angry at the scene. Because only three months, compared Gatsby’s parties with his funeral, things changed from heaven to hell. People who used to come to parties by hundreds disappeared silently. They made best use of Gatsby when he was useful and forgot him as soon as he was useless. It reveals the hypocritical relationship among people and the moral degradation of the Jazz Age.
3.2 Irony and pathos to other characters
3.2.1 Daisy Buchanan
“Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?”
“Very much.”
“It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about — things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept.” (Fitzgerald, 2003: 23)
The marriage of Tom and Daisy Buchanan seems menaced by a quiet desperation beneath its pleasant surface.
Her husband Tom was arrogant and dishonest; advancing racist arguments at dinner though he has lots of money he made love with lots of women even when she gave birth to a baby.
“All right,” I said, “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool”(Fitzgerald, 2003: 23). Daisy speaks these words in Chapter 1 as she describes to Nick and Jordan her hopes for her infant daughter. Unlike Nick, Tom Daisy, on the other hand, tries hard to be shallow, even going so far as to say she hopes her baby daughter will turn out to be a fool, because women live best as beautiful fools. Daisy is not a fool herself but is the product of a social environment that, to a great extent, does not value intelligence in women. Daisy’s remark is somewhat sardonic: while she refers to the social values of her era, she does not seem to challenge them. Daisy herself often tries to act such a part. She conforms to the social standard of American femininity in the 1920s in order to avoid such tension-filled issues as her undying love for Gatsby.
3.2.2 Tom Buchanan
Tom dissatisfied too. His wife doesn’t love him. Tom had lots of lovers but maybe nobody really love him. He doesn’t have stable life and would drift on for ever, just like Nike has said in the novel.
Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it — I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on for ever, seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game. (Fitzgerald, 2003: 8-9)
3.2.3 Myrtle Wilson
Tom’s lover, whose lifeless husband George, owns a run-down garage in the valley of ashes. Myrtle herself possesses a fierce vitality and desperately looks for a way to improve her situation. Unfortunately for her, she chooses Tom, who treats her as a mere object of his desire. Tom disrespected her and Myrtle even has no right to say Daisy’s name.
Sometime towards midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs Wilson stood face to face discussing, in impassioned voices, whether Mrs Wilson had any right to mention Daisy’s name.
“Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!” shouted Mrs Wilson. “I’ll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai —”
Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.
Then there were bloody towels upon the bath-room floor, and women’s voices scolding and high over the confusion a long broken wail of pain. (Fitzgerald, 2003: 49-50)
3.2.4 George Wilson
Myrtle’s husband, “He was a blond, spiritless man, anemic, and faintly handsome” (Fitzgerald, 2003: 33) the lifeless, exhausted owner of a run-down auto shops at the edge of the valley of ashes. George loves and idealizes Myrtle, and is devastated by her affair with Tom. Though Wilson’s lifestyle and attitude differ greatly from those of Gatsby, Gatsby and Wilson share the fact that they both lose their love interest to Tom.
Wilson is poor. When he saw Tom and Nick a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. He thought Tom came for business; actually Tom came for his wife. His wife, “walking through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye” (Fitzgerald, 2003: 34).
At last when his wife was killed he finally became braved and became a real man. Maybe he thought that he had revenged his wife. But unfortunately until he took his own life, he still didn’t know who was the real murderer.
3.2.5 The common people in the novel
In the novel many parts describe the helpless and hollow mood of people at that time. “There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars” (Fitzgerald, 2003: 52).
From the word moth we can feel that men and girls lived a meaningless life, seeking for luxury and enjoyment without any aim.
At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others — poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner — young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life. (Fitzgerald, 2003: 77)
From these words they reflect that people are spiritually barren at that time.
From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a man named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine […] And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr Chrystie’s wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all […] Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs Ulysses Swett’s automobile ran over his right hand […] And the Catlips and the Bembergs and G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterwards strangled his wife […] Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square. (Fitzgerald, 2003: 77-83)
These are the people on the list that Nick wrote down on the empty spaces of a timetable the names of those who came to Gatsby’s house that summer. They were all believers of the American Dream and they were all came to no good end. Perhaps this day they indulged themselves in the Gatsby’s party, then next day they met different kinds of unfortunate. Nobody can escape from the tragic fate.
Conclusion
This novel shows the readers a vivid picture of 1920s with its surface prosperity and the underlying sadness. “Jazz Age”, “Age of the Flapper”, “Lawless Decade” are some of the labels pasted on the twenties. It is a time of youth, a time of profound cultural and social changes. The contrast of the main characters presents more clearly the different people in 1920s. People of that time have strong mind of pursuing money. One important purpose is to show off to others. They want to be admired and respected by others. They innocently believe that happiness lies in wealth and such admiration. They pursue a kind of extravagant life which is attractive with beauties, champagne and expensive cars and clothes. Unfortunately, they lose everything in the end. The sharp contrast between dream and reality not only explains Gatsby’s failure at the end, but also explains the meaninglessness of that age.
Gatsby reveals himself to be an innocent, hopeful young man who stakes everything on his dreams, not realizing that his dreams are unworthy of him. Gatsby invests Daisy with an idealistic perfection that she cannot possibly attain in reality and pursues her with a passionate zeal that blinds him to her limitations. His dream of her disintegrates, revealing the corruption that wealth causes and the unworthiness of the goal, much in the way Fitzgerald sees the American Dream crumbling in the 1920s, as America’s powerful optimism, vitality, and individualism become subordinated to the amoral pursuit of wealth.
Nick compares the green bulk of America rising from the ocean to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Just as Americans have given America meaning through their dreams for their own lives, Gatsby instills Daisy with a kind of idealized perfection that she neither deserves nor possesses. Gatsby’s dream is ruined by the unworthiness of its object, just as the American Dream in the 1920s is ruined by the unworthiness of its object - money and pleasure. Like 1920s Americans in general, fruitlessly seeking a bygone era in which their dreams had value, Gatsby longs to recreate a vanished past - his time in Louisville with Daisy — but is incapable of doing so. When his dream crumbles, all that is left for Gatsby to do is die.
The cruel reality smashed Gatsby’s dream. Fitzgerald’s comment on the failure of Gatsby’s dream is also a statement on the failure of the American Dream. The contrast of the dream and the reality significantly indicates a moving away from faith and hope in a world where material interests have driven out sentimentality and faith. What is more, dream, even if it persists, is utterly helpless and defenseless against a material society. It can only be defeated. Gatsby is an example. Owing to his unrealistic dream, Gatsby’s fate turns out to be a tragedy. Because he isn’t conscious of his unrealistic dream of love and he doesn’t correctly handle contradictions between ideal and reality, Gatsby sinks into this kind of unreal dream so deeply that he can’t wake up. And the final result of Gatsby is surely miserable.
Gatsby’s American Dream is broken. There is nothing left to him after his death, his wealth no longer means anything, and Daisy does not come back to him, either. Gatsby makes a great effort for his dream. He erroneously believes that money can buy him love and happiness. So he lives his whole life in pursuit of wealth and power. Gatsby believes he can win Daisy back by the possessions he owns. But he obtains nothing from his money and his dream is totally lost. The Great Gatsby is a chronicle of the failure of the American Dream. The rise and fall of Jay Gatsby parallels the rise and fall of the American Dream. The author compares the theme of the American Dream with Gatsby’s dream of getting Daisy back. When Gatsby ultimately loses his dream, the American Dream finally becomes a disillusion.
The most conspiring contrast in this novel is the conflict between dream and reality. Fitzgerald said that American’s great promise is that something is going to happen, but it never does. American is the moon that never rose. This indictment of the American Dream could well serve as an epigraph for the protagonist Gatsby, the true heir to the American Dream. He pursues an elusive dream, which even though sometimes within his grasp, continues somehow to evade him.
In this way, Gatsby continues to function as a symbol of America in the 1920s, which, as Fitzgerald implies throughout the novel’s exploration of wealth, has become vulgar and empty as a result of subjecting its sprawling vitality to the greedy pursuit of money. Just as the American Dream — the pursuit of happiness — has degenerated into a quest for mere wealth, Gatsby’s powerful dream of happiness with Daisy has become the motivation for lavish excesses and criminal activities.
Every fancy thing in the world is unreal, and the American Dreams are the cloud castles. Fitzgerald shows a running theme of how the American Dream affects all of the characters in The Great Gatsby, especially the major male characters. Gatsby is a symbol for the whole American experience. The irony and pathos of Gatsby is, in a profound sense, the irony and pathos of the American Dream itself. Undoubtedly, Gatsby’s tragedy is an inevitable fate and nobody can escape from it.
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My deepest gratitude goes first and foremost to Professor Guo Xinyu, my supervisor, for her constant encouragement and guidance. She has walked me through all the stages of the writing of this thesis. Without her consistent and illuminating instruction, this thesis could not have reached its present form.
High tribute also shall be paid to all the other professors and teachers who have instructed me during my graduate study for their direct or indirect help for me.
I also owe my sincere gratitude to my friends and my fellow classmates who gave me their help and time in listening to me and helping me work out my problems during the difficult course of the thesis.
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