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and wealth in his background made Fitzgerald very conscious both of money and of social standing, and it also made him very uncertain of his own social position. All his life he pursued conventional status symbols, yet a part of his mind stood apart and viewed these symbols coldly and cynically.
 To sum up, Fitzgerald’s family plays a guiding or basic role in forming his controversial senses.
B. Influences from the Author’s Life and Environment
Many of the above-mentioned events in Fitzgerald’s early life appear in The Great Gatsby. Like Fitzgerald, Nick is a thoughtful young man, who is educated at Ivy League School (in Nick’s case, Yale), and moves to New York after the war. Like Fitzgerald, Jay Gatsby is a sensitive young man who idolizes wealth and luxury and falls in love with a beautiful young woman while stationed at a military camp in the South.
When Fitzgerald was in his teens, he started to demonstrate his interest in literature. He published fictions in the school magazine. However, his attitude toward literature was ambiguous. Writing, indeed, seems to have been merely one method among many for securing social position. And he also devoted himself with equal enthusiasm to “club politics and athletics, as a means of achieving the status he so intensely craved even as a boy”.22We can find the shadow on Gatsby. To win Daisy, Gatsby devoted himself to love. Fitzgerald used literary as a key to pursuing what he wanted while Gatsby used money as a key to winning Daisy.
In 1917, Fitzgerald was both distracted and delighted at excitement of the European war, as well as of his engagement to Zelda Sayre, a lovely girl of good family with a background of considerable wealth. Both hopes collapsed, however. The war ended before he was sent for action. After he was discharged from the army, Fitzgerald’s engagement with Zelda broke down. He had to face the dilemma: on the one hand he should prove that he had the ability to earn enough money which attracted Zelda most in short time, on the other hand, he would fail to do so and lose her. “ I was in love with a whirlwind” said Fitzgerald, “and I must spin a net big enough to catch it out of my head, a head full of tricking nickels and sliding dimes, the incessant must box of the poor.”23 After being successful in literature, he married his golden girl and spent wonderful time with her in New York. It was, as Fitzgerald later put it, “a “carnival” which was to continue for several years in Europe as well as in New York, a merry-go-round which, at least for a time, featured an inexhaustible supply of golden rings.”24
Although Fitzgerald was living a frenetic life at this time, he had always sensed a core of rottenness beneath the surface of splendor: the moral emptiness and hypocrisy. This was reflected on the two main characters of the novel, Nick and Gatsby.
And now we need to look at the American Dream and the colorful and violent world of the 1920s, because they all have great impact on Fitzgerald’s inner conflicts or controversial senses.
The American dream was originally about discovery, individualism, and the pursuit of happiness. In 1920s, the American economy soared, bringing unprecedented levels of prosperity to the nation. People began to spend and consume at unprecedented levels. Prohibition, the ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, made millionaires out of b本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。