In the history of American literature, the 1920s was called the "Jazz Age", and Scott Fitzgerald, known as the "Poet Laureate of Jazz Age", wrote in 193 1: "This is an era of miracles, an era of art, an era of ridicule and an era of indulgence." Of course, that era was also an era of knowledge and intelligence. Many outstanding literary works, including Fitzgerald's novels, have written a glorious page in the history of American literature.
Scott Fitzgerald was born in Washington, D.C. on 1896. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was well-informed and gentle, and was deeply bound by the rules of the southern old school. Even in middle age, he is still a very beautiful and charming man. My mother is a woman "worse than a beautiful woman" in my father's eyes. They had two daughters, but both died of illness before 1 year old. Later, they gave birth to a son, and Mr. Edward named him Francis Scott Ken Fitzgerald in memory of this glorious distant ancestor. The death of their two daughters made the couple particularly concerned and sensitive about their son's health. They cared about Fitzgerald in every way, and even if they had a little cold, they wouldn't let him go to school.
The Fitzgerald family's life is unstable, partly because of economic difficulties. Therefore, Fitzgerald's birthday celebration seems somewhat disappointing. The worst thing was his birthday when he was seven. He was dressed in a sailor suit, ready to play the role of host, but no guests came.
Fitzgerald is competitive. At the age of eight, after killing a child, he ran home and made up a series of reasons to avoid being scolded by his parents.
1908, the Fitzgerald family moved back to Sao Paulo. This is the most difficult day for the whole family, because my father's business failed. Perhaps influenced by this incident, Fitzgerald began to study hard and achieved quite good results. He likes sports, dancing and music very much. From then on, he began to become a "persistent writer". Soon his first work, The Mystery of Raymond's Mortgage, became a genre. The story was published in the June issue 1909 of the school literature publication "The Hours".
19 1 1 year, 15 years old Fitzgerald went to Newman, a preparatory school run by the Catholic church. Besides studying his lessons, he also loves sports very much, and he is excellent in both study and competition.
19 13 years, Fitzgerald entered Princeton university. In college, he learned what real poetry is from the young poet John Pierre Bishop. Under the influence of the poet, he began to like Keats' poems.
It was clearly Bishop who convinced Fitzgerald that English professors in Princeton were mediocre people, and they could not tell poetry from bad long and short sentences. Fitzgerald brought this view to the classroom, and then there was a fierce conflict with the classroom teacher. A very narrow-minded teacher angrily pointed out that Fitzgerald was not doing well in school. Fitzgerald immediately stood up and said, "Sir, you can't fail me. I am a writer. " The school doesn't tolerate his poor grades because he calls himself a "writer". June 19 16 1 was forced to drop out of school.
Failure is humiliating, at the same time, he suffered the blow of lovelorn. Despite his outstanding talent, his lover was not interested in quality, but only in quantity, and soon abandoned him.
1965438+In April 2007, Fitzgerald, who had just returned to school for less than half a year, joined the army and participated in the First World War.
19 18 In the summer, when Fitzgerald's team was stationed in sheridan Barracks, Alabama, he met Nada Seri at the country club dance and began his indomitable pursuit. But he also pestered another girl, May Steiner. In the end, he chose Nalda.
1920 In April, they got married. At this time, Fitzgerald was already a writer on the eve of success, and everything was full of brilliance and unexpected things for him.
In Fitzgerald's Paradise on Earth, there is obviously the shadow of Nalda, and the novel character rosalind is from Nalda. His works, novels, poems, plays and close-ups have all appeared in Saturday Evening Post, Metropolis and People in Fashion.
Love and marriage become the focus of Fitzgerald's novels. Marriage has become a common theme in his several important novels three or four years after his marriage. Although his marriage is happy, the themes involved in this aspect in his literary works all imply some misfortune.
192 1 year1October 26th, my daughter Francis was born. Since then, many of his works have been published, including the famous Flying Rocket, Head & Shoulders, The Girl Everyone Loves and so on. His personal account books kept increasing, and he became a rich man.
Fitzgerald was extremely vain since he was a child. After winning a lot of money, the luxurious life not only satisfied his vanity, but also brought him more troubles and emptiness. Drinking day after day and the regrets, cunning and embarrassing excuses that follow. My love for Nada, my persistence in marriage, and the jealousy, resentment and quarrel that followed. ...
All these reflect a kind of helpless destruction and a waste of time and talent. He once dreamed of becoming a first-class writer and imagining himself as a great businessman, but all this was ruined by his life of "day after day, always at 3 o'clock in the middle of the night" and "doing nothing but attending one party after another". Endless hilarity and alcoholism infected him with tuberculosis. 1940 65438+February 2 1, he ended his burning years at the age of 44 early due to a heart attack, leaving behind the last giant, which is likely to become another brilliant masterpiece with only six chapters and become a great regret in the literary world. I don't know whether Nalda wasted his talent or he wasted Nalda's talent. They are both lovers and enemies. Nada was finally sent to an insane asylum because of a nervous breakdown and died miserably.
Fitzgerald and his two-year-old daughter Scott. Little Scott looked at the front curiously.
The basic plot of The Great Gatsby also belongs to the same pattern, but Fitzgerald's genius lies in transforming a "triangle relationship" with almost no romantic color into a unique "great" Gatsby's sentimental tragedy.
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What's so great about Gatsby?
Gatsby has been pursuing "an indescribable universe" since he was a child;
In fact, Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island comes from his platonic ideas about himself. He is the son of God … so he must serve his heavenly father and devote himself to a wide, vulgar and flashy beauty.
Once I fell in love with "golden couple", "his unspeakable longing was combined with her short breath". She became the embodiment of his ideal. Although Daisy had already moved on, although he clearly heard that "her voice was full of money", he still did not change his original intention and stubbornly pursued revisiting old dreams:
Daisy lags far behind his dream-not because of her own fault, but because his dream has great vitality. His dream transcends her and everything. He devoted himself to this dream with a passion for creation, constantly adding branches and leaves and embellishing it with every gorgeous feather floating in.
Therefore, his persistent pursuit and persistence in his ideals also transcended the worldly grievances between men and women. In order to relive his old dreams, he devoted himself to the muddy water of new york's money world, but he was not interested in wealth itself and dissolute life.
I paid a high price for holding my dream for too long. He must have looked up at the strange sky through the terrible leaves and felt creepy. At the same time, he found how ugly a rose is, and how cruel the sun shines on the newly grown grass.
His soul is suffering, but he has no regrets and will not die. "Those who don't lose childlike innocence are also." The narrator of the novel admitted from the beginning that he never praised or criticized the characters easily, but before bidding farewell to Gatsby, he confidently shouted: "They are a group of bastards, not as good as you." Therefore, Gatsby is "great".
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Gatsby was born in American civilization in the 1920s. After World War I, the unharmed United States entered an unprecedented era of prosperity in history. The "American Dream" is like a colorful balloon wandering in mid-air, which dazzles and fascinates a generation of Americans. Fitzgerald said: "This is the most pleasant and gorgeous era in American history, and there will be a lot to write about in this era." It was this era that he featured in capital letters and named it "Jazz Age", so people often called him "chronicler" and "Poet Laureate" of Jazz Age.
Philip is not an amateur historian. He is addicted to the "Jazz Age" and totally immersed in his own works. Because of this, he can vividly reproduce the social outlook, life breath and emotional rhythm of that era. But more importantly, while indulging in it, he can look on coldly, experience the frustration of "the lights are dim and the wine wakes people up", measure everything with strict moral standards, and express the disillusionment of the "lost" generation after the war with a sad tone. It can be said that The Great Gatsby is not only an elegy in the jazz age, but also an American tragedy similar to Dreiser's masterpiece, and it is also a projection of the author's own "Night of the Soul". "It is always 3 am there."
The novelist describes a "American dream" in the "Jazz Age" with concise and lyrical language. From drums and music to the sadness of broken dreams and death, the plot, characters, dialogues, scenes and themes are all integrated into a perfect work of art. As the Chinese novelist Shen Congwen said, a small Greek temple is "exquisite, firm and symmetrical, although small in shape, but not exquisite."
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However, The Great Gatsby is not only about the disillusionment of the American dream. It also wrote the tenacious vitality of "the last and greatest dream of mankind", and Gatsby's unrepentant narrow escape is its best symbol.
The novel ends like this:
Gatsby believes in this green light, this happy future that will disappear before our eyes every year. It escaped our pursuit before, but it doesn't matter-tomorrow we will run faster and reach farther ... one day. ...
So, we struggled to row forward, and the boat went upstream and kept going backwards.
Fitzgerald's "A Ship Upward" was finally buried in the cemetery of an ancient St. Mary's Catholic Church in Rockville, Maryland. I think at the beginning, a blond boy who was unwilling to be lonely dreamed of using his brilliant talents to build a splendid paradise on earth and enjoy all the happiness on earth. Once upon a time, I was poor and sick, and my dreams were broken and I woke up. He couldn't help but come to this corner to rest in peace and share a pile of loess and eternal loneliness with his pink girl. The last sentence of this masterpiece is engraved on a stone tablet on the ground in front of the tombstone. Coincidentally, Bill Gates, the giant of the contemporary "American Dream" and the computer king, also took this sentence as the motto of "sailing against the current" and engraved it on the ceiling of a luxury library room in Washington State.