【外国文学】了不起的盖茨比 The Great Gatsby.docx

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1、【外国文学】了不起的盖茨比 The Great GatsbyChapter 1Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,I must have you!"-THOMAS PARKE D'INVILLIERSChapter 1In my younger and more vulnerable years my father ga

2、ve me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since."Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."He didn't say any more but we've always b

3、een unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quic

4、k to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought-frequently I have feigned sleep, p

5、reoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon-for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgm

6、ents is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admissi

7、on that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on.When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more

8、 riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction-Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was som

9、ething gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of th

10、e "creative temperament"-it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No-Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake

11、 of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we're descended f

12、rom the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.I never saw this great-uncle but I'm supposed to look like him

13、-with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father's office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so th

14、oroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe-so I decided to go east and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my

15、aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, "Why-yees" with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.The practical thing w

16、as to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at

17、 eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the

18、electric stove.It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road."How do you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly.I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. H

19、e had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees-just as things grow in fast movies-I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.There was so much to read for one thing and

20、 so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas

21、 knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides.I was rather literary in college-one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News"-and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of

22、all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just an epigram-life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous

23、island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water

24、in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals-like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end-but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a

25、 more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.I lived at West Egg, the-well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of th

26、e egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard-it was a factual imitation of some H?tel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a th

27、in beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion.Or rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been over

28、looked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires-all for eighty dollars a month.Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the e

29、vening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that eve

30、r played football at New Haven-a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy-even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach-but now he'd l

31、eft Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest.It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in Fra

32、nce, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it-I had no sight into Daisy's heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seekin

33、g a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Col

34、onial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens-finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front

35、was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a

36、rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner.Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body-he seemed to fill those gl

37、istening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage-a cruel body.His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There

38、was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked-and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts."Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." We were in the

39、 same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch."I've got a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing ab

40、out restlessly.Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore."It belonged to Demaine the oil man." He turned me arou

41、nd again, politely and abruptly. "We'll go inside."We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end.The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way

42、 into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling-and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.The only completely stationary obj

43、ect in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments l

44、istening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall.Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.The younger of the two was

45、a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it-indeed, I was almost surprised i

46、nto murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise-she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression-then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room."I'm p-paralyzed wit

47、h happiness."She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had.She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker.(I&

48、#39;ve heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)At any rate Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again-the object she was balancing had

49、 obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voic

50、e that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth-but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that th