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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.

Abstract

This paper mainly analyzes the author’s controversial senses reflected on the two main characters in The Great Gatsby: Gatsby’s controversial senses on his relation with wealth and on his romantic and tragic love as well as Nick’s yearning and rejected heart to the life in New York and his conflicting attitudes to the loss of morality. What caused the author’s inner conflicts is analyzed through the two characters from the aspects of their family, life and the environment. The complicated feelings and ideas of the author are shown through the analysis. In the end, the paper touches the core of Fitzgerald’s controversial senses, that is, the fact that he found his own spiritual emptiness.

Key words: analysis; controversial senses; impact; spiritual emptiness

I. A Brief Introduction

A. The Author—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, and was named after his ancestor Francis Scott Key, the author of The Star-Spangled Banner. He was raised in St. Paul, and sent to a New Jersey boarding school in 1911. Despite the fact that he was a mediocre student there, he managed to be enrolled at Princeton in 1913. Academic troubles and apathy plagued him throughout his time at college, and he never graduated, instead, he was enlisted in the army in 1917, as World War I neared its end.
Fitzgerald became a second lieutenant, and was stationed at Camp Sheridan, in Montgomery, Alabama. There he met a wild seventeen-year-old beauty named Zelda Sayre and fell in love with her. Zelda finally agreed to marry him, but her overpowering desire for wealth, fun, and leisure made her delay their wedding until he could prove a success.
With the publication of This Side of Paradise in1920, Fitzgerald became a literary sensation, earning enough money and fame to convince Zelda to marry him. In 1922, he published his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned which also was received very well. Fitzgerald once described this period of his career as the “greatest, gaudiest spee in history”.1
Written in 1925, The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest literary documents of this period. Although Fitzgerald himself felt that he had at last produced important works and wrote to the critic Edmond Wilson from France “my book is wonderful,”2，the book received mixed notices from the reviewers, and “fell far short of the financial harvest produced by the woe previous novels.”3 However, as the giddiness of the Roaring Twenties dissolved into the bleakness of the Great Depression, Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and Fitzgerald battled alcoholism, which hampered his writing. He published Tender Is the Night in 1934, and sold short stories to The Saturday Evening Post to support his lavish lifestyle. In 1937, he left for Hollywood to write screenplays, and in 1940, while working on his novel The Love of the Last Tycoon, died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four.
B. The Story of The Great Gatsby
Nick Carraway, a young man from Minnesota, moves to New York in the summer f 1922 to learn about the bond business. He rents a house in the West Egg District of Long Island, a wealthy but unfashionable area populated by the new rich, a group who have made their fortunes too recently to have established social connections and who are prone to garish displays of wealth. Nick’s next-door neighbor is a mysteri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。