The Contrastive Techniques in the Great Gatsby英语论文.doc

The Contrastive Techniques in the Great Gatsby Abstract The Great Gatsby with its depiction of the Jazz Age marks the highest point of F Scott Fitzgeralds artistic achievement T S Eliot once concluded that it was the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James In this novel the author successfully employed the contrastive techniques which endow the novel with artistic glamour and profound connotation This paper intends to illustrate the contrastive techniques in terms of scenes characters as well as dream and reality The significance of these contrasts lies in the fact that they help the readers to have a better understanding of the Jazz Age the personalities of the main characters and the American dream The careful deliberate employment of contrastive techniques not only testify to Fitzgeralds craftsmanship in planning and developing the novel but also contribute a great deal to the reveal of the tragic theme that is the disillusion of American dreamKey Words contrast scene character dream reality 1 IntroductionF Scott Fitzgeralds masterpiece The Great Gatsby shows us a vivid picture of the 1920s with its superficial prosperity and underlying sadness The failure of American dream and the crisis of value are well reflected in characters and the details of the novel In The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald skillfully employed the contrastive techniques in terms of scenes characters as well as dream and reality These techniques not only deepen the tragic theme but also imparted the text a brand-new interpretation and profound artistic glamour 2 The employment of contrastive techniques21 The contrast of scenesThe author gives us a vivid description of various scenes in the novel among which the most impressive are the sharp contrast between Gatsbys parties and his funeral and the strong contradicts between the east and the west These two pairs of contrastive scenes foreshadow Gatsbys tragical destinationcom The parties vs the funeralThe Jazz Age is a time of broken dream a time of flapper a time of changes and a time of financial boom Its clearly reflected in the description of Gatsbys parties These parties are fashionable but pointless It is only a show-off of Gatsbys riches and material success The crowds hardly know their host many come and go without invitation The music the laughter and the faces all blurred as one confused mass show the purposelessness and the loneliness of the party-goers beneath their marks of relaxation and joviality All this is typical of the Jazz Age when many people lose belief in American dream and indulge themselves in drinking and dancing The great expectations which the first settlement of the American continent brings vanish and so despair and doom set inIn his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the starsOn week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains And on Mondays eight servants including an extra gardener toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears repairing the ravages of the night before Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York-every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves Chapter 3 52 The exavagent life the noisy people constitute Gatsbys parties However the depiction of the fashionable and meaningless parties serves to highlight Gatsbys tragedy by contrasting the grandeur of his party with his violent death with the frustration of his dream Gatsbys funeral is rather deserted and cheerless compared with his parties Its a record of human coldness Nick has invited some people to come to Gatsbys funeral These people are all Gatsbys so-called friends They find a lot of excuses for their absence because they know clearly that Gatsby is no longer useful for them Gatsbys generous parties have not brought him even one friend Whats more Daisy once Gatsbys lover the real killer hadnt sent a message or a flower Chapter 9 233 The sharp contrast between the exavagence of the parties and the coldness of the funeral reveals the hypocritical relationship among people and the moral degradation of the Jazz Agecom The East vs the West In one sense the moral conflict in the novel is resolved into a conflict between East and West-the ancient and corrupt East and the raw but virtuous West Nick attributes his moral attitude to his Middle Western background Nicks experience in the East results in his return with relief to the West After Gatsbys death the East was haunted for me like that distorted beyond my eyes power of correction So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home Chapter 9 236 Home it seems clear is a place where the fundamental decencies are observed and virtue is honored The East is a representation of sophistication and moral degradation while the West is the embodiment of virtue and harmony In the novel the author fabricated the East Egg and the West Egg whose geographical contrast shows the conflicts of different valuesTheir physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilation in every particularexcept shape and size Chapter 1 6 The Buchanans live in white palaces of fashionable East Egg while Gatsby and Nick who comes to New York to deal with bond business live in less fashionable West Egg East Egg is a paradise for upper-class society Its more degraded and amoral However West Egg symbolizes hope promise and reinvigoration22 The contrast of main charactersIn The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald successfully delineated many impressive characters such as Gatsby Tom Nick Daisy Wilson and etc The contrast of their character and personality is striking in this novel among which the contrast between Gatsby and Tom between Nick and Gatsby are especially noticeableGatsby is sensitive and idealistic almost divine in his dedication to his love and faith Although his wealth came from his criminal activities Gatsby manages to hold the readers sympathy throughout The whole-hearted dedication of Gatsby and his sincere belief in what he does make him heroic and this submerges the unpleasant details so that they dont seem important in the final outcomeCompared with Gatsby Tom is sinister and sly They are careless people as Nick describes them Tom and Daisy-they smashed up things and creature and then retreated back into their money or their carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess-they had made Tom is more sophisticated When he finds that things are not moving to his favor he is determined to arrange things to suit himself no matter whom he hurts in the process When he finds out Gatsbys interest in his wife for example Tom is quick to force Gatsby to a showdown It is not certain that Tom wants Daisy because he loves her His desire to keep his wife may just reflect the pride of a man who refuses to have his wife taken away from him by another man And added to this pride is Toms social consciousness To surrender Daisy to a man who is his social inferior is too humiliating to bear Gatsby therefore finds himself up against Toms ruthlessness and social arroganceTom however does not only smash up Gatsbys dream After the accident Gatsbys sentimental outlook prevents him from safeguarding himself against blame Tom is quick to take advantage of this He makes Gatsby bear the responsibility for Myrtles death So Tom does not only destroy Gatsbys idealism but also Gatsbys life The Buchanans show how people can use their position to look down on others and live their life carelessly As Nick says about Daisy in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged Chapter 1 24 It is this superior mind set that allows Tom to cheat on his wife and allows him and Daisy to run away from the death of Myrtle They need not worry about such things because they are too good for it They can use their wealth and position to escape whatever they choose That Tom is able to defeat Gatsby so easily and goes unpunished points to the fact that in a materialistic society people like Tom rich ruthless and cunning will always triumph Idealism and sentimentality especially when carried to the extreme are sure to be taken advantage of by otcom2 Nick vs GatsbyIt is true that Nick Carraway begins by merely recording events and keeping a distance between himself and characters such as Buchanans and Gatsby But he is soon caught up with the people and events around him His sympathy for Gatsby grows until he not only feels responsible for him at his burial he understands what Gatsby stands for All this however does not mean that Nick can be totally identified with Gatsby against the Buchanans On the contrary Nick is completely different unlike Gatsby in most respects Nick Caraway is sensitive and intelligent he alters his evaluation of others as he learns more about them He preserves a rational mind that makes him also realize what is wrong with Gatsby Gatsby on the other hand is idealistic and romantic His personality remains unchanging and static His view of life remains one-sided and unreal at the end For Gatsby the material world has always been amorphous and only the world of dreams essentially real Born in a society where inexhaustible possibilities seemed to dwell in the white palaces of the rich Gatsby saw their accumulated booty as the instruments of their secret charm His dream is timeless and incorruptible but the woman and the world to which he weds his dream are both mortal and corrupted So his dream is doomed to failWhile Gatsby and the Buchanans guard their interests single-mindedly Nick learns to see matters from others point of view and achieves moral insight and wisdom which make him a more complete person For example Nick Carraway is the only person who is aware of the destructive flow of time and of the spiritual death that has overtaken Tom Daisy Jordan and the people around them and Gatsby In the afternoon that Gatsby fails to hold Daisy Nick remembers suddenly that it is his birthdayI was thirty Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a new decadeThirty-the promise of a decade of loneliness a thinning list of single men to know a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm thinning hair But there was Jordan beside me who unlike Daisy was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age Chapter 7 182 Nick acknowledges his subjection to time recognizes the losses that it imposes on man and at the conclusion of this passage the significance is twofold when he says so we drove on toward death through cooling twilight Chapter 7 182 They are moving not only towards the death of Myrtle Wilson but the portentous menacing road that will culminate in their own deaths The novel indirectly traces Nicks development from detachment to participation from unconcern to understanding from a narrow subjective outlook to a broad indulgence 23 The contrast between dream and reality The most conspiring contrast in this novel is the conflict between dream and reality American dream means that in America one might hope to satisfy every material desire and thereby achieve happiness It is deceptive because it proposes the satisfaction of all desire as an attainable goal and identifies desire with material Fitzgerald said Americans great promise is that something is going to happen but it never does American is the moon that never rose This indictment of the American dream could well serve as an epigraph for the protagonist Gatsby the true heir to the American dream He pursues an elusive dream which even though sometimes within his grasp continues somehow to evade him With great magnitude of his glittering illusion and the single-mindedness he tries to make it a reality Nowhere is Gatsbys romantic idealism more evident in his determination to conquer time to make one instant of his life immortal Throughout the novel Gatsby seeks the recovery of his moment of fulfillment he wants to obliterate time to expunge the years of separation from Daisy to annihilate everything except the instant that wed the fulfilled future and the wistful past When Nick Carraway tells Gatsby that the past cant be repeated Gatsby is incredulous Cant we repeat the pastWhy of course you can Chapter 6 148 In truth his doomed hope is not only to repeat the past but to seize a never-ending magical moment with Daisy that would join pursuit and capture seed-time and the harvest But the tragedy of Gatsby is that he fails to understand that he cant recapture the past his fresh new love for Daisy no matter how much money he makes no matter how much wealth he displays Daisy despite Toms coarseness and open unfaithfulness refuses to leave the security of her established position for Gatsbys adoration and precarious wealth Gatsby scarifies his life on the alter of his dream unaware that it is composed of the ephemeral stuff of the pastThe cruel reality smashed Gatsbys dream Fitzgeralds comment on the failure of Gatsbys dream is also a statement on the failure of American dream The contrast of the dream and the reality significantly indicates a moving away from faith and hope in a world where material interests have driven out sentimentality and faith What is more dream even if it persists is utterly helpless and defenseless against a material society It can only be defeated Gatsby is an example Owing to his unrealistic dream Gatsbys fate turns out to be a tragedy Because he isnt conscious of his unrealistic dream of love and he doesnt correctly handle contradictions between ideal and reality Gatsby sinks into this kind of unreal dream so deeply that he cant wake up And the final result of Gatsby is surely miserable3 Conclusion Fitzgeralds fiction reveals the hollowness of the American worship of riches and the unending American dreams of love splendor and gratified desires and shows what American meant in terms of the reckless 1920s prohibition speakeasies new cars victory abroad popular fads and new wealth The Great Gatsby presents the American scene during those riotous years The novel is a superb recreation of the high-keyed frantic atmosphere of the times F Scott Fitzgeralds distinguishing styles and his creative writing skills are best exemplified in The Great Gatsby The contrastive technique endows the novel with artistic glamour and profound connotation The contrasts of scenes of main characters as well as between the dream a