ABSTRACT:The Great Gatsby is ranked second in the Modern Library’s lists of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century. This novel depicts the wild pursuit of money and enjoyment in the “roaring 20s” and criticizes the spiritual crisis and the disillusion of the American dream. After a short period of prosperity, the America burst out the unprecedented economic crisis in 1929. And history repeated after 80 years, America again broke out the economic crisis under the financial fraud and the credit bubbles. Fitzgerald’s prediction that American dream is dead sounds right and meaningful when considering it today. This paper wants to analyze this book in a new perspective. It will compare the background of the Great Gatsby with the time we are experiencing today. From a nationwide view; both periods experience the disillusion of the American dream to different extent; from a social perspective, both periods experience a fundamental change from prosperity to poverty, from hopefulness to hopelessness economically and culturally; from an individual’s point, everyone is struggling between morality and reality in the long way of pursuing dreams, but some are degenerated and became the slave of money and reality, some are great dreamers, working to realize his dream. When analyzing these three aspects, the detailed analysis of people and society in the Great Gatsby will be combined in order to better understand the background of the book and to see what it means to us right now.
Key Words: the Great Gatsby; the Jazz Age; economic crisis; comparison
中文摘要:20世纪末，美国学术界权威在百年英语文学长河中选出一百部最优秀的小说，《了不起的盖茨比》高居第二位，傲然跻身当代经典行列。这部小说的写作背景是追求金钱和享乐“喧嚣的20年代”，而在这短暂的经济繁荣之后美国就于1929年爆发了空前的金融危机，遭遇了百年不遇的经济大萧条。80年后，美国的历史再次重蹈覆辙，在金融欺诈和恶性金融信贷的金融泡沫下，美国再次爆发了金融危机。在两段惊人的相似的历史之下，菲茨杰拉德在《了不起的盖茨比》中颇为先知的预测美国梦的破灭和消逝放在今日似乎更加体现这个预言的准确性和教育意义。本文希望从一个全新的角度来分析这本书，将《了不起的盖茨比》文本的分析和所处的时代背景相结合并和当今时代之间的相似之处进行对比。从整个国家来看，两个时代都经历了不同程度的美国梦的幻灭和消失；从整个社会来看，两个时代在经济和文化上经历了从繁荣到衰退，从充满希望到无限失望的过程；从每个个体来看，每个人都在实现自己的梦想时经历了理想和现实的斗争，而有的人沦为了现实和金钱的奴隶，有的人为了梦想而奋斗，熠熠生辉。在对这三个角度分析时，结合菲茨杰拉德的《了不起的盖茨比》中对人物，对社会的细腻深刻的解读，来更好的剖析他对他所处的时代的理解，以及对我们所处的现在的这个时代的深刻影响和警示意义。
关键词：了不起的盖茨比；爵士时代；金融危机；对比
