Unworthy Pursuit of Unrealistic Dream Is Always a Tragedy——The Analysis of The Great Gatsby

武漢大學外國語言文學學院　翟瑜佳

Unworthy Pursuit of Unrealistic Dream Is Always a Tragedy——The Analysis of The Great Gatsby

武漢大學外國語言文學學院翟瑜佳

中圖分類號：G4

文獻標識碼：A

文章編號：1671-864X（2015）03-0121-01

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

abstractThis ending sentence seems , while in fact it just uses metaphor and symbolism and its actual meaning is straightforward∶longing for unrealistic goal would always be at the cost of morality and it’s hardly be realized.

When Jay Gatsby was a young military officer in Louisville before World War I, he met a pretty girl, Daisy, and immediately fell in love with her aura of luxury, grace, and charm. However, when Gatsby came back after the war, he found that Daisy had married a rich man, Tom Buchanan. From that moment on, Gatsby dedicated himself to winning Daisy back, and his acquisition of millions of dollars, his purchase of a gaudy mansion on West Egg, and his lavish weekly parties were all merely means to that end. In the process of describing Gatsby pursuing the forbidden love, the author repeatedly used the image“green light”and associated Gatsby with green light skillfully. In Chapter 1, Gatsby firstly appeared and he was stretching out his arms towards a single green light, which was“minute and far away”, symbolizing the slim hope of success. In Chapter 5, when Gatsby and Daisy met again,“if it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,”said Gatsby.“You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”The green light is the embodiment of his lover and desire for brilliant future. Then in the end,“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”Thus it can be seen that green light is the hope that has always inspired Gatsby, but the dream is unrealistic and unworthy. Gatsby invests Daisy with an idealistic perfection that she cannot possibly attain in reality and pursues her with a passionate zeal that blinds him to her limitations. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”This reveals that the ascent with meaningless goals equals to descent. In this process we would lose many things, such as moral, innocence and faith.

On the surface, The Great Gatsby is a story of the thwarted love between a man and a woman. The main theme of the novel, however, encompasses a much larger, less romantic scope. Though all of its plot takes place over a mere few months during the summer of 1922 and is set in a circumscribed geographical area in the vicinity of Long Island, New York, The Great Gatsby is a highly symbolic meditation on 1920s America as a whole, in particular the disintegration of the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess. Just as Americans have given new ideals and values through their dreams for their own lives, Gatsby instilled Daisy with distinctive personalities and characteristics, regarding her as a symbol of all the virtue of the upper class. Actually, Gatsby did have an optimistic and active American dream∶he believed that he could get fortune through personal struggle and then step into upper social class, which was full of beauty and glory of love. But at that time—the period called“Jazz Age”by the author—American social atmosphere became voluptuous and gorgeous. People blindly pursued the enjoyment, aspired after money and were infatuated with wine and sex. Daisy was also influenced by that kind of social background inevitably. She was selfish, pompous and shallow. We can see it from that Daisy left Gatsby two times, the first for a wealthy and easy marriage, the second for the maintain of her dreamed material life, and she allowed Gatsby to take the blame for killing Myrtle Wilson even though she herself was driving the car. Therefore, it’s unworthy for Gatsby to devote his whole life energy and pure emotion to pursue Daisy. It is the huge gap between Gatsby’s ideal life and cruel reality made it a certainty that Gatsby’s pursuing would be a tragedy. In the same way, the American dream in the 1920s was ruined by the unworthiness of its goals—money and pleasure. Living in a world where money took precedent over moral integrity made pursuits of truth and goodness doomed to fail.

As the narrator, Nick stated that there is a“quality of distortion”to life in New York, and this lifestyle made him lose his equilibrium, especially early in the novel, as when he got drunk at Gatsby’s party in Chapter 2. After witnessing the unraveling of Gatsby’s dream and presiding over the appalling spectacle of Gatsby’s funeral, Nick realized the cruel insight of American dream corruptions. Having gained the maturity, he decided to return to Minnesota in search of a quieter life structured by more traditional moral values. Nick uttered the last sentence to show his awakening and point out the theme.