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摘要：F. Scott Fitzgerald recorded what he and his generation really thought about, what they pursued and what they lacked in his period. That is to say the novel is intertwined with Fitzgerald’s understanding of himself and his generation. The dilemma that Nick, Gatsby and Fitzgerald face is: whether to pursue one’s dreams and neglect the heart’s moral or to face the reality that such dreams are illusory.

most writers, Fitzgerald was a public figure. His lifestyle in the 1920s seemed daring and glamorously desirable to thousands of envious readers. Fitzgerald showed this image in more than one way. Publishers of popular magazines often published articles by and about him; and more than most writers, he based a good deal of his fiction on his own personal experiences. “During his lifetime it was not always easy to tell when his life provided material for his fiction and when his fiction supplied material for his life.” 14Because his life and his work intertwined, biographical information contributes to an understanding of The Great Gatsby. But we need to be aware that not everything in the fiction links to the author’s life. “Although many writers have added biographical material in their fiction, it is unlikely that any major writer wrote fiction solely for the purpose of writing about his life”.15 From the author’s family and life and the social environment, the readers may have easier understanding why Fitzgerald, either consciously or unconsciously, brings his internal conflicts into his fiction.
A. Influences from the Author’s Family
Born in St. Paul, in 1896, Fitzgerald was the son of a salesman whose career was ruined when he lost his job in 1908. The family, which had been living in New York State, returned to St. Paul. “Fitzgerald’s maternal grandfather was the St. Paul merchant P. F McQuillan, a hard-working man with the ‘strict integrity’ and ‘soundness’ so characteristic of middle-merchant group of the area.” 16 The wholesale grocery business founded by the old man was worth over a million dollars when he was dead. Fitzgerald’s mother shared $250,000 with the four other McQuillan children. Although Fitzgerald’s father ran a wholesale grocery business, the family depended on money from his mother’s relatives. His father’s relatives had culture and tradition, but the socially inferior relatives on his mother’s side had money. Each side looked down upon the other. “Fitzgerald was often deeply embarrassed by his mother, who often talked about for her awkward and eccentric behavior.”17
It was, indeed, mainly due to his mother’s family that Fitzgerald could be described as someone “born into the country club set.”18 The position of the family in this set, however, was rather ambiguous:

Neither “aristocrats” nor “nobodies”: they dwelt in a kind of social twilight-zone best symbolized by Fitzgerald’s own description of one of the houses in which he lived as a St. Paul teen-ager: it was, he says, “a house below the average on a street above the average.” We can easily find that Fitzgerald was lack of personal security.19

Anyhow, Fitzgerald was deeply influenced by his family. On his mother’s side, at any rate, Fitzgerald inherited “a tradition in which financial ‘success’ was still defined by a strong awareness of moral solidity and ethical responsibility, a tradition in which good business was directly related (rather than irrelevant) to good citizenship and social responsibility.”20 This family based on ethic was referred to in The Great Gatsby by Nick, as in the end of the novel he said he wished for a world that would “stand at moral attention forever”.21
However, on his father’s side, he did not inherit any kind of tradition as from his mother’s side. Maybe we can say he had some air of a Southern Gentleman from his father.
This conflict between culture