The Great Gatsby

Class：2014083 Number：20141017 Name：张雯颖

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald that follows a cast of characters living in the fictional town of West Egg on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922. The story primarily concerns the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his quixotic passion and obsession for the beautiful former debutante Daisy Buchanan. Considered to be Fitzgerald's magnum opus, The Great Gatsby explores themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, social upheaval, and excess, creating a portrait of the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties that has been described as a cautionary tale regarding the American Dream.

The main events of the novel take place in the summer of 1922. Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate and veteran of the Great War from the Midwest—who serves as the novel's narrator—takes a job in New York as a bond salesman. He rents a small house on Long Island, in the fictional village of West Egg, next door to the lavish mansion of Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire who holds extravagant parties but does not participate in them. Nick drives around the bay to East Egg for dinner at the home of his cousin, Daisy Fay Buchanan, and her husband, Tom, a college acquaintance of Nick's. They introduce Nick to Jordan Baker, an attractive, cynical young golfer with whom Nick begins a romantic relationship. She reveals to Nick that Tom has a mistress, Myrtle Wilson, who lives in the \ground between West Egg and New York City. Not long after this revelation, Nick travels to New York City with Tom and Myrtle to an apartment Tom keeps for his affairs with Myrtle and others. At Tom's New York apartment, a vulgar and bizarre party takes place. It ends with Tom breaking Myrtle's nose after she annoys him by saying Daisy's name several times.

As the summer progresses, Nick eventually receives an invitation to one of Gatsby's parties. Nick encounters Jordan Baker at the party, and they meet Gatsby himself, an aloof and surprisingly young man who recognizes Nick from their same

division in the Great War. Through Jordan, Nick later learns that Gatsby knew Daisy through a purely chance meeting in 1917, when Daisy and her friends were doing volunteer services' work with young Officers headed to Europe. From their brief meetings and casual encounters at that time, Gatsby became (and still is) deeply in love with Daisy. And even more, he became obsessed with the idea of her, and the ideal of living in the world he saw her living in, as the fulfillment of all the possible dreams he could ever have.

The cover of the first printing of The Great Gatsby is among the most celebrated pieces of art in American literature. It depicts disembodied eyes and a mouth over a blue skyline, with images of naked women reflected in the irises. A little-known artist named Francis Cugat was commissioned to illustrate the book while Fitzgerald was in the midst of writing it. The cover was completed before the novel; Fitzgerald was so enamored with it that he told his publisher he had \it into\the novel.Fitzgerald's remarks about incorporating the painting into the novel led to the interpretation that the eyes are reminiscent of those of fictional optometrist Dr. T. J. Eckleburg which Fitzgerald described as \– their retinasare one yard high. They look out of no face, but instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose.\the painting, a closer explanation can be found in the description of Daisy Buchanan as the \whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs.\copy of The Great Gatsby to read, he immediately disliked the cover, but \me not to be put off by it, that it had to do with a billboard along a highway in Long Island that was important in the story. He said he had liked the jacket and now he didn't like it.\

Sarah Churchwell sees The Great Gatsby as a \downside of the American dream.\The story deals with the limits and realities of America's myths of social and class mobility; and the inevitably hopeless lower class aspirations to rise above the station(s) of their birth. The book in stark relief through the narrator, Nick Caraway, observes that: \

parcelled out unequally at birth.\delves into themes of excesses of the rich, and recklessness of youth.Others, like journalist Nick Gillespie, see The Great Gatsby as a story \class differences; even in the face of a modern economy's attempt to assert that the class structure is based; not on status and inherited position; but, upon the innovation and the ability of literally anyone, to succeed by meeting the ever-changing demands and tastes of consumers' needs.\interpretation asserts that The Great Gatsby captures the American experience because it is a story about change and those who resist it; whether the change comes in the form of a new wave of immigrants (Southern Europeans in the early 20th century, Latin Americans today), the nouveau riche, or successful minorities, Americans from the 1920s to modern day have plenty of experience with changing economic and social circumstances. As Gillespie states, \of Gatsby's basic conflict between established sources of economic and cultural power and upstarts in virtually all aspects of American society.Because this concept is particularly American and can be seen throughout American history, readers are able to relate to The Great Gatsby (which has lent the novel an enduring popularity).