美國(guó)文學(xué)11 FScott Fitzgerald

1、F.Scott Fitzgerald I. Life experienceFrancis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896December 21, 1940) was an Irish-American Jazz Age novelist and short story writer.Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. In his own age, Fitzgerald was the self-styl

2、ed (using a name, title, etc which one has given oneself) spokesman of the Lost Generation, or the Americans born in the 1890s who came of age during World War I.He crafted five novels and dozens of short stories that treat themes of youth, despair, and age. Many admire what they consider his remark

3、able emotional honesty. His heroes handsome, confident, and doomed blaze brilliantly before exploding, and his heroines are typically beautiful, intricate, and alluring.F. Scott Fitzgerald on a United States stamp Early yearsBorn in Saint Paul, Minnesota to a Roman Catholic family, Fitzgerald was na

4、med for his distant but famous relative Francis Scott Key, but was commonly known as Scott.Fitzgerald spent 18981901 and 19031908 in Buffalo, New York, where his father worked for Procter & Gamble. When Fitzgerald, Sr., was fired, the family moved back to Minnesota, where Fitzgerald attended Saint P

5、aul Academy and Summit School in Saint Paul, Minnesota from 19081911. He then attended Newman School, a prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey, in 191112. He entered Princeton University in 1913 as a member of the Class of 1917 and became friends with the future critics and writers Edmund Wilson (Cla

6、ss of 16) and John Peale Bishop (Class of 17). Saddled with (give sb an unwelcome responsibility, task, etc) academic difficulties throughout his three-year career at the university, Fitzgerald dropped out in 1917 to enlist in the United States Army when America entered World War I.While at Camp She

7、ridan, Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre (19001948), the top girl, in Fitzgeralds words, of Montgomery, Alabama, youth society. The two were engaged in 1919 and Fitzgerald moved into an apartment at 200 Claremont Avenue in New York City to try to lay a foundation for his life with Zelda.Working at an adver

8、tising firm and writing short stories, Fitzgerald was unable to convince Zelda that he would be able to support her. She broke off the engagement and Fitzgerald returned to his parents house in St. Paul to revise The Romantic Egotist. Recast as This Side of Paradise, it was accepted by Scribners in

9、the fall of 1919, and Zelda and Scott resumed their engagement. The novel was published on March 26, 1920, and became one of the most popular books of the year, defining the flapper generation. The next week, Scott and Zelda were married in New Yorks St. Patricks Cathedral. Their daughter and only c

10、hild, Frances Scott Scottie Fitzgerald, was born on October 26, 1921. The 1920s proved the most influential decade of Fitzgeralds development. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, published in 1922, represents an impressive development over the comparatively immature This Side of Paradise. Th

11、e Great Gatsby, which many consider his masterpiece, was published in 1925. Fitzgerald made several famous excursions to Europe, notably Paris and the French Riviera, and became friends with many members of the American expatriate community in Paris, notably Ernest Hemingway.Fitzgerald drew largely

12、upon his wifes intense personality in his writings, at times quoting direct segments of her personal diaries in his work. Zelda made mention of this in a 1922 mock review in the New York Tribune, saying that “it seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which myster

13、iously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. FitzgeraldI believe that is how he spells his nameseems to believe that plagiarism begins at home (Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings, 338).Fit

14、zgerald began working on his fourth novel during the late 1920s but was sidetracked (divert from the main topic) by financial difficulties that necessitated his writing commercial short stories, and the schizophrenia that struck Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald in 1930. Her emotional health remained fragile f

15、or the rest of her life. In 1932, she was hospitalized in Baltimore, Maryland, and Scott rented the La Paix estate in the suburb of Towson to work on his book, which had become the story of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychoanalyst and his wife, Nicole, who is also one of his

16、patients. It was published in 1934 as Tender Is the Night. 1 Critics regard it as one of Fitzgeralds finest works.Always something of an alcoholic and consequently in poor health during the late 1930s, Fitzgerald suffered two heart attacks in late 1940. After the first he was ordered by his doctor t

17、o avoid strenuous exertion (great effort) and to obtain a first floor apartment. As Sheilah Graham, his lover at the time, had an apartment on the first floor, he moved in with her. On the night of December 20, 1940 he had his second heart attack; but since the doctor was to come to his house the fo

18、llowing day, he and Sheilah went home. On December 21, 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald collapsed while clutching the mantlepiece in Sheilah Grahams apartment and died at the age of 44.His funeral was attended by very few people. Among the attendants was Dorothy Parker, who reportedly cried and murmured, t

19、he poor son of a bitch, a line from Jay Gatsbys funeral in Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby. Zelda died in a fire at the Highland mental institution in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1948. II. Major works2.1. NovelsThis Side of Paradise (1920) The Beautiful and Damned (1922) The Great Gatsby (1925) Tende

20、r Is the Night (1934) The Last Tycoon (1940) 2.2. Short story collectionsFlappers and Philosophers (1920) Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) All the Sad Young Men (1926) Taps at Reveille (1935) The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1989 2.3. Other worksThe Vegetable (play, 1923) The Crack-Up (essays a

21、nd stories, 1945) III. Points of view3.1. Spokesman of the “Jazz AgeFitzgerald was a representative figure of the 1920s. He never failed to remain detached and foresee the tragedy of the “Dollar Decade. His works mirror the exciting age in almost every way. Through the glittering world of his fictio

22、n run the themes of moral waste and decay and necessity of personal responsibility. The Great Gatsby, a book about the Jazz Age, is a case study in peoples pursuit of an elusive American Dream. It is also a powerful criticism of American society, as damning a document as The Waste Land. Thus he is o

23、ften acclaimed literary spokesman of the Jazz Age. 3.2. Moral outlookIn his works, Fitzgerald is mainly concerned with the moral degradation in modern America that resulted from the rapid growth of capitalism and material comfort. In his opinion, people seemed to care more about material luxuries th

24、an moral upgrade. They became treacherous, cunning, money-oriented, and, in the end, immoral, as we can see in The Great Gatsby, where people are obsessed with parties, orgies, and free sex. By writing the novel, he intended to remind his countrymen of the discrepancy between the material well-off a

25、nd the moral degeneration. 3.3. Artistic viewLike Henry James, Fitzgerald would keep an aesthetic distance from his characters, thinking that the author should be detached as much as possible so as to give more freedom to his characters. Like Joseph Conrad, he uses the limited point of view, leaving

26、 much of the narration to a character that shares more or less his ideas. In writing novels, he also adopts dualism, that is, to involve himself in the story and to detach himself from it at the same time so that he can stand aside analyze that participation, which not only makes his work more matur

27、e but also more powerful.IV. Special features4.1. Theme of the American DreamFitzgeralds favorite theme is the American Dream. In The Great Gatsby and other works, a general pattern can be found to fully demonstrate Fitzgeralds enthusiasm and his disillusionment with the American Dream: formally, a

28、poor young man from the West trying to make his fortune in the East, but thematically, the young man goes on a journey of discovery from dream, through disenchantment, and finally to a sense of failure and despair. In this general pattern of the protagonists personal experience is incarnated the who

29、le of American experience. 4.2. Narrative technique Fitzgerald inclines to tell the story through a person who functions both as a character in the story and the narrator of the whole work. Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby is a case in point. As a character, he is “within, involving himself in the

30、actions of the story, yet as a narrator, he is standing away from the story and able to give an objective presentation to the events and characters of the novel.4.3. Symbolism His The Great Gatsby is a highly symbolic novel, in which almost every thing has a symbolic meaning. For instance, the valle

31、y of ashes, the billboard eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, Daisys voice, Gatsbys mansion in the West Egg, the green light at the end of Daisys dock, and so on, can all be interpreted in a symbolic way. They are highly suggestive and deliberately chosen by the author to help dramatize his thematic concer

32、n of the heros loss of the mythic vision and the tragedy that comes after it. 4.4. Languagesmooth, sensitive, original, simple and gracefulV. Appreciation of the excerpt5.1. ThemesThe Great Gatsby is an examination of American myth in the 20th century. Fitzgerald deliberately depicts Gatsby as a mys

33、terious person so as to achieve the effect that Gatsby is American Everybody. The death, or rather the murdering, of Gatsby poignantly points at the truth about the withering of the American Dream and the ironic effect it has produced upon the whole American myth. 5.2. Character portrayal5.2.1. Jay

34、GatsbyGatsby in the novel represents the newly rich upstart, vulgar in his ostentatious showy wealth. However, he becomes a kind of new American Adam. He is “great, because he is dignified and ennobled by his dream and his mythic vision of life. 5.2.2. Nick CarrawayNick is both a narrator and a character in this novel. He leads us to the dignity and depth of Gatsbys character, and suggests the relation of his tragedy to the American