The Illusions of American Gilded Age by Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Foreign Language Department of Anshan Normal University,Anshan,Liaoning Email:1370937271@qq.com

[Abstract]As one of the greatest novelist in modern American and the world literature,F.Scott Fitzgerald recorded in his novels the prosperity of the American material world after World War I and the degeneration of the old American dream which composed the American people’s basic values and moral beliefs.He has,as the embodiment of the Jazz Age,squandered most part of his energy on pursuing the rich extravagance meanwhile,using the rest displayed his unique talent as one of the greatest writers.From twenty-four to forty-four,Fitzgerald has experienced success,prosperity,bitter life,heavy alcoholism,depression,poverty and failure.Using his unique literary talent,he has revived in his novels these typical feelings of the American people of his age.This paper tries to reveal an age of illusions and lostness in the nineteen twenties through analyzing history background and the character weaknesses of the heroes in the Great Gatsby.

[Keywords]Fitzgerald;illusion;extravagance;character weaknesses

Introduction

The Great Gatsbyis an immediate critical success and is regarded as Fitzgerald’s masterpiece and his perfectly planned and rounded piece of fiction,T.S.Eliot described the novel as“the first step”American fiction had taken since Henry James.Before the publication ofThe Great Gatsby,Fitzgerald has so far in his first two novels and plenty of short stories set up the theme that a young man of humble origin either lives in an eternal romantic dream,suffering from the sorrow of his unrequited love for the magical girl in the distance,or he actually captures her and is inevitably disillusioned.These romantic young men feel that the rich girls are supposed to be able to fulfill their identity and be successful because American society especially during the period of the first decades of the nineteen twenties engenders among its people an illusion that success means the possessing of wealth and a beautiful rich girl.The Great Gatsbydoes follow this theme.But the novel ends with the death of the hero,Jay Gatsby,whose death completely denies the American dream most young Americans have believed to be realizable.Unlike Fitzgerald’s previous two novels,Fitzgerald began in this novel to create characters who were no longer merely the embodiment of his own youthful romanticism and cynicism.Gatsby,with power and dream,comes inevitably to stand for America itself.The United States is the only nation that prides itself upon a dream which can be called by one name —the American dream.Gatsby of West Egg,Long Island,“sprang from his platonic conception of himself.He was a son of God--a phrase which,if it means any thing,means just that--and he must be about his father’s business,the service of a vast,vulgar,and meretricious beauty.”(Fitzgerald,1925,p.99)Fitzgerald’s vision of his protagonist has been broadened.If his two previous heroes merely stand for themselves,Gatsby stands for his social class and embodies all the young men who take the ideal as the real and finally become victims of their own illusions and romantic yearnings.

The“crippled”characters of the heroes

Many scenes and descriptions inThe Great Gatsbyhave become touchstones of American prose:Gatsby’s party,the shirt display,the guest list and vivid portraits of characters.The structural success contributes a great deal to the novel’s perfection.He has skillfully chosen Nick Carraway as the ideal narrator because he is connected by background to the Bychanans(Daisy is his cousin,he had been at Yale with Tom)and by proximity to Gatsby(he rents a house near Gatsby’s mansion)and he claims that he has cultivated that habit of withholding judgment,Nick Carraway disapproves either Gatsby or the Buchanans.As an objective narrator,he can observe and criticize with an outsiders points of view,everything that happens is filtered through his perceptions.He is“within and without simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”(Matthew,1981,p.190)His role as an authorial narrator makes the novel complete and attractive.

The ultimate cause of Gatsby’s failure is his romantic vision of the world and of himself,because he lacks a firmly developed set of moral standards whereby to judge the limitations of his quest for love and of his romantic dreams.However,on the other hand,he is also defeated externally in his quest for his identity by the social forces embodied by the Buchanans.In this novel,what Fitzgerald does magnificently well,is to show the way love is affected by social class in the United States.He has so far in his works especially inThe Great Gatsbydescribed one moral lesson that love becomes degrading when it roams too far across lines.Tom Buchanan’s brutality to his mistress,Myrtle Wilson,together with her pitiful attempt at imitating upper class speech and behavior makes their party and their affair almost extremely sordid.The people from the upper class have a natural contempt upon the lowers,And the“newly”rich like Gatsby is usually always despised by those who have been rich for generations.The atmosphere of social discrimination and cultural difference can be felt everywhere in the novel.Gatsby’s lavish parties are actually full of bad tastes and conspicuous display,but he thinks them splendid gatherings of the best and brightest.His rich creamcolored car is in Tom’s eyes just a“circus wagon.”There is something overstated about everything Gatsby owns.And his attempt to imitate the style of wealth is so obvious that he is despised and mistrusted by the snobbish“safely”rich.

Gatsby dies of“a love for which there is no worthy object.”(Allen,1957,p.123)He becomes the victim of his own vision of himself and the world.He asks too much of the pose Daisy and the power of wealth.Daisy’s shallowness and the limitation of the material world can never satisfy Gatsby’s limitless yearnings.However,the grandeur of his romantic yearning remains and his greatness lies in his capacity for illusion.Only Gatsby in this novel believes that a person can completely remove certain parts of one’s past that are burdensome and imaginatively create one’s self anew.He dies with his dream unfulfilled.

Though hundreds had come to Gatsby’s parties,hardly anyone came to his funeral.Besides the father and Dick Carraway,there came the“owl-eyed man”(Donaldson,1983,p.66)who had started to find that the books in Gatsby’s library were real,even though their pages were uncut.Like his books,Gatsby is real,but unformed,unlettered,and for all his financial cunning,ignorant.His death makes him tragic and great.

Complete denial of the American dream

as a self-centred man,Fitzgerald has never completely understood his wife,Zelda.Therefore,the heroines he portrayed are all one-sided and lack necessary elements of being successful characters,As Fitzgerald often blamed Zelda for having ruined his whole life,his heroes are often created much purer and full of talents but finally ruined by their love or marriage to a rich and selfish woman.While reading Fitzgerald’s novels,we should remember that the heroes,like their creator himself,are the victims of their own weaknesses even though the social forces play an important role in their failure and degeneration.

It would be misleading to blame the heroines for having ruined the heroes,because in Fitzgerald’s novels,the women are almost all extremely selfish and conceited.Though Fitzgerald was good at flattering women and getting their love,he had not the real understanding of them.He was too simple-minded about his wife Zelda,though he resembled in many places in characters with her.He ignored one fact that it was he who had made the decision to marry Zelda,and his characters had been formed before he met her.The heroes in his novels have all made the same mistake,they fall in love with their idealized girls,and in fact these girls are simply the romantic images in their minds.It’s understandable that when they do get their girls,they feel disillusioned and love gradually become hatred.Either the heroes or the heroines become the victims of their romantic love.Neither of them have the right to blame one another for ruins of lives and futures.They have made the wrong choice and are doomed to be damned.Their characters influence every decision they make in their lives.Therefore,Fitzgerald and his heroes has become the victims of their own inner weaknesses.

With the development of modern psychology,we know that a person’s character is formed in his childhood and adolescence,that is,a person’s basic identity is determined by his/her early education at home and at school.Family education,relationships between father and mother and closeness of the family members are the necessities for the child to gain a firm self-knowledge and self-assurance.An authentic identity determines whether the child could deal with the people and the world naturally and properly when he grows up and leaves his parents’smothering love and protection.The character and personality a person possesses during his childhood will influence his mode of living,his way of choosing his career and his manner of dealing with people around him.If we regard the social influences as the external forces then the characters of a person can be considered as the internal force.This force is the determining element of a person’s final destiny.Therefore,analyzing a person’s characters and its causes and developing course is the essential step in literary critics.A character fails or decays mainly because he lacks a firm identity and he can not control his inner desires,that is to say,the hero deteriorates from inside,he is weak inside and lacks a knowledge of his capacities and real needs.He is the victim of his own character flaws.

If in his first two novels,Fitzgerald has written down his own anxiety of his adolescence and his unhappy destructive marriage life from his third novelThe Great GatsbyFitzgerald matured.He no longer confined himself to the description and recording of his egotistic youthful world,he began to set his story in a much more broad history background.Fitzgerald’s heroes,handsome and promising and romantic,all join the people looking for fame,success and beauty.Their age and their society spur and push them to do so.Some people do succeed and become wealthy and powerful.However,it is not everyone who can turn this dream into reality.Fitzgerald’s heroes all end with failure even though their characters are varied.

The Great Gatsbyhave shown us one fact that the heroes are victimized by their own innocence and romantic dream.They have to face their doom because of their own psychological weaknesses.The society they live in supplies them with illusions and they,with their lostness and decay,quicken its decline.They are born for their age and have made their age always shine with an epic grandeur.

Conclusion

In Fitzgerald’s novels,the characters all share the main features of the nineteen twenties and thirties:prosperous and depressing,hopeful and nostalgic,productive and conservative.The plenty of illusions the heroes possess come from the education they receive at home and at school.American dream illuminates and attracts everyone.Success,wealth and romantic love stimulate and encourage people to conquer and to possess.Tracing their failing and decaying courses,it is not difficult to find that their fatal weaknesses are their character flaws.The society they live in offer them with beautiful dreams,their inner weaknesses finally fail them and even bring them to their tombs.Reading the novels Fitzgerald wrote with bitterness and sorrow,people can not help wondering what if Fitzgerald had been a man of self-dominance and self-assurance.However,maybe because Fitzgerald’s imperfectness in characters,he became the embodiment of his generation and had represented in his novels the illusions and lostness of his age.Reviewing Fitzgerald’s life and his novels,one can not help asking:Do I know myself?What’s my identity,is it authentic or pragmatic?How lucky a person will be if he is not victimized by his own character flaws.