2. 3 Nick’s role as a spokesman to mirror the writing intention of Fitzgerald.
Nick is not only a successful narrator in the novel, but also is a spokesperson of the author’s moral. One of the dominant themes of The Great Gatsby was surely one of the prevailing themes of Fitzgerald’s life.
2. 3. 1 Fitzgerald’s personality mirrored by Nick
In the Great Gatsby, Nick has the same background with Fitzgerald. He represents one part of Fitzgerald’s personality: “the quiet, sober and reflective Midwesterner adrift in the lurid East.” [1] Fitzgerald gives the background of Nick in the beginning of the first chapter, “My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carrayways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch,….”[1] And, Nick’s description of himself in the novel holds true throughout the novel: he is tolerant and slow to judge, someone with whom people feel comfortable sharing their secrets. They are both thoughtful young men, who like literary in college and write a series of articles, and both have the experience to be in for the World War I. After the War, they find the wild and extravagant life seductive and exciting. Nick also functions as Fitzgerald’s voice. He feels disappointment to the lifestyle and the arrogance of the upper-class. He is also disgusted with the moral decay that he witnesses among the rich in New York, and finds the moral emptiness and hypocrisy beneath the glitter of the Jazz Age.“ Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the board,…even then it had always for me a quality of distortion. West Egg, especially still figures in my more fantastic dreams” [7] It is also Fitzgerald’s idea longing for this absent moral center. And at last, from his length meditation, Nick finally muses that, in some ways, this story is a story of the West, even though it has taken place entirely on the East Coast. He remembers life in the Midwest, full of snow, trains, and Christmas wreaths. In contrast, he thinks that the East seems grotesque and distorted. So, all Nick can do is to move back to Minnesota, where American values are not decayed. In sum, it evidently shows that Nick represents one part of Fitzgerald’s personality: the quiet, sober and reflective Midwesterner adrift in the lurid East.
2. 3. 2 Fitzgerald’s writing intention reflected by Nick
If Gatsby represents one part of Fitzgerald’s personality, the flashy celebrity who pursued and glorified wealth in order to impress the woman he loved, then Nick represents another part of his personality. Due to this reason, Nick reflects the writing intention of Fitzgerald. And the analysis is as follows:
To begin with, Nick is the perfect choice to express the ideas of Fitzgerald. As for the temperament of Nick, as he tells in the novel, he is a tolerant, open-mined, quiet and a good listener, Nick is the perfect person to speak Fitzgerald’s thoughts out. Then, His experience of life decides that Nick is the right role to express his idea. Fitzgerald is a sensitive man who idolizes wealth and luxury and who fall in love with a beautiful young woman while stationed at a military camp in the south. At the very beginning, Fitzgerald finds the fast-paced, fun-driven lifestyle of New York seductive and exciting, he finds himself “in an era in which unrestrained materialism set the tone of the society, particularly in the large cities of the East”[7] when Fitzgerald becomes famous for his works, his beautiful wife suffers from mental crackdown so that he has to work hard to make money to sent his wife to the best mental hospital, meanwhile as he himself is painful to feel the losing of his writing gift, Fitzgerald battled alcoholism. Finally, from those mentioned above, it can easily know that, like Gatsby, Fitzgerald is driven by his love for a woman who symbolizes every thing he wants, even as she leads him towards everything he despises; what’s more, like Nick, he sees “the glitter of the Jazz Age to the moral emptiness and hypocrisy beneath, and part of him longed for this absent moral center” [8]
3 Reflection of Nick for the female roles
In the novel, Nick is the spokesman of Fitzgerald, whose point of view in female is related to the background of 1920s. so that it is imperative to analyze the context of woman’s status in 1920s.In Barbara Welter’s “the Cult of True Womanhood ,1820-1860”, there is “the attributes of True Womanhood , by which a woman judged by herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors and the society, could be divided into four cardinal virtues—piety , purity, submissiveness and domesticity” [8] these four virtues together define an ideal image for middle-class women from a masculine point of view. As the first attribute of the true woman, religion or piety to God is the core of woman’s virtue and is considered the source of her strength. The reason that religion is valued so much lies in that it does not take a woman away from her home. Purity is as essential as piety to a young woman, without it, she is considered no woman at all, but a member of the lower class. Submission is perhaps the most feminine virtue expected of woman. Since men are always regarded as the movers, the doers, the actors, women should be the passive, submissive responders accordingly. Such an order is believed to have been fixed in Heaven. Woman are warned that if they tamper with this quality, they are tampering with the order of the universe. A case in point is the Daisy’s doleful prophecy about her little daughter, “…that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”[1] that is, a good woman should be ignorantly submissive with these four virtues. The true womanhood defines the home as that proper sphere of woman and confines their lives to religion and housekeeping, if any woman asks for a greater scope for her gifts, she would be condemned. the Cult of True Womanhood after all is a series of restrictions established by the traditional culture to control women and ensures male’s domination. Apparently, with his special interest in the Victorian times, Fitzgerald is deeply influenced by these values about “true woman” and it is natural for him to convey them in his writings. Based on an understanding of special historical context Of American in the 1920s,Fitzgerald is found unexceptional in expressing and describing male’s domination as well as women’s being dominated. In relationship between the two sexes, men are depicted as the protectors and possessors of women, performing the role of a patriarch or master; while women are always the subordinate beings, the essence of such relationship is that men provide women with protection and support in exchange for women’s submissiveness and dependence. Just as Kang Zhengguo said, “all the female images created in literatures of phallocentric societies are expressing men’s opinions and requirements about women and serving to ensure to ‘sexual politic’ of patriarchal culture”.[9] In the novel, man has the right to decide the fate of woman, man are challenging each other with their economic power and social status for the right to possess the women who are deprived of the right to make their own choice, only waiting for the winning man to take her away. They can not take control of their own lives, but follow the arrangement and reallocation of them decided by men. The challenge occurs between Tom and Gatsby, their contest has finally come in to the open in he Plaza Hotel when Tom senses Gatsby’s intension to claim Daisy.转贴于 酷文网-论文下载中心 http://www.coolwen.net
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