名著 | The Great Gatsby 《了不起的盖茨比》
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald that follows a cast of characters living in the fictional town of West Egg on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922. The story primarily concerns the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his quixotic passion and obsession for the beautiful former debutante Daisy Buchanan. Considered to be Fitzgerald's magnum opus, The Great Gatsby explores themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, social upheaval, and excess, creating a portrait of the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties that has been described as a cautionary tale regarding the American Dream.
《了不起的盖茨比》是美国作家弗·司各特·菲茨杰拉德创作的中篇小说。主人公詹姆斯·卡兹本是北达科他州的一个贫穷的农家子弟，自幼梦想做个出人头地的大人物。经过一番努力，他终于步步高升，并更名为杰伊·盖茨比，自以为是上帝的儿子。他在一个军训营里任中尉时，爱上了南方的大家闺秀黛茜·费。可是当他戴着军功勋章在战争结束后从海外归来时，黛茜已嫁给了一位来自芝加哥的、体格健壮、极为富有但举止粗鲁的纨绔子弟汤姆·布坎农，沉醉于爱情梦幻中的盖茨比艰苦创业，由一个贫穷的军官奋斗成为百万富翁……
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Fitzgerald—inspired by the parties he had attended while visiting Long Island's north shore—began planning the novel in 1923, desiring to produce, in his words, "something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned." Progress was slow, with Fitzgerald completing his first draft following a move to the French Riviera in 1924. His editor, Maxwell Perkins, felt the book was vague and persuaded the author to revise over the next winter. Fitzgerald was repeatedly ambivalent about the book's title and he considered a variety of alternatives, including titles that referenced the Roman character Trimalchio; the title he was last documented to have desired was Under the Red, White, and Blue.
First published by Scribner's in April 1925, The Great Gatsby received mixed reviews and sold poorly; in its first year, the book sold only 20,000 copies. Fitzgerald died in 1940, believing himself to be a failure and his work forgotten. However, the novel experienced a revival during World War II, and became a part of American high school curricula and numerous stage and film adaptations in the following decades. Today, The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be a literary classic and a contender for the title "Great American Novel." In 1998, the Modern Library editorial board voted it the 20th century's best American novel and second best English-language novel of the same time period.
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The main events of the novel take place in the summer of 1922. Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate and veteran of the Great War from the Midwest—who serves as the novel's narrator—takes a job in New York as a bond salesman. He rents a small house on Long Island, in the fictional village of West Egg, next door to the lavish mansion of Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire who holds extravagant parties but does not participate in them. Nick drives around the bay to East Egg for dinner at the home of his cousin, Daisy Fay Buchanan, and her husband, Tom, a college acquaintance of Nick's. They introduce Nick to Jordan Baker, an attractive, cynical young golfer with whom Nick begins a romantic relationship. She reveals to Nick that Tom has a mistress, Myrtle Wilson, who lives in the "valley of ashes",[11] an industrial dumping ground between West Egg and New York City. Not long after this revelation, Nick travels to New York City with Tom and Myrtle to an apartment Tom keeps for his affairs with Myrtle and others. At Tom's New York apartment, a vulgar and bizarre party takes place. It ends with Tom breaking Myrtle's nose after she annoys him by saying Daisy's name several times.
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The Plaza Hotel in the early-1920s
As the summer progresses, Nick eventually receives an invitation to one of Gatsby's parties. Nick encounters Jordan Baker at the party, and they meet Gatsby himself, an aloof and surprisingly young man who recognizes Nick from their same division in the Great War. Through Jordan, Nick later learns that Gatsby knew Daisy through a purely chance meeting in 1917, when Daisy and her friends were doing volunteer services' work with young Officers headed to Europe. From their brief meetings and casual encounters at that time, Gatsby became (and still is) deeply in love with Daisy. And even more, he became obsessed with the idea of her, and the ideal of living in the world he saw her living in, as the fulfillment of all the possible dreams he could ever have.
Gatsby spends many nights staring at the green light at the end of Tom and Daisy's dock, across the bay from his mansion, hoping one day to rekindle their lost romance. Jordan confides in Nick that the only reason he bought the mansion is that it was across the bay from Tom and Daisy's home. And Gatsby's extravagant lifestyle and wild parties were an attempt to impress Daisy and raise her curiosity about her "anonymous" neighbor across the bay. Gatsby had hoped that one day curiosity would have brought the unsuspecting Daisy to appear at his doorstep, and thereby he'd be able to present himself as a "new man", now of wealth and position, and now able to join her at her side and within her world. That however never played out, and although Tom had been invited (as a guest of Jordan's) to a Gatsby party and had attended more than one of them, both he and Daisy had (for different reasons) never responded affirmatively to an RSVP to attend as the Buchanans (Mr. and Mrs.). The deeper reasons behind this fact are expanded upon later in the story by Daisy. His research of Nick, who has so fortuitously rented the small cottage next door to Gatsby's mansion, results in a wholly new approach to his problem of how to introduce Daisy to the "new" J. Gatsby.
The whole purpose of the "invitation" to Nick to attend a Gatsby party was to develop a relationship with him so that Gatsby could later ask Nick to arrange a reunion between himself and Daisy. Nick invites Daisy to have tea at his house without telling her that Gatsby will also be there. After an initially awkward reunion, Gatsby and Daisy reestablish their connection. They begin an affair and, after a short time, Tom grows increasingly suspicious of his wife's relationship with Gatsby. At a luncheon at the Buchanans' house, Daisy speaks to Gatsby with such undisguised intimacy that Tom realizes she is in love with Gatsby. Though Tom is himself involved in an extramarital affair, he is outraged by his wife's infidelity. He forces the group to drive into New York City and confronts Gatsby in a suite at the Plaza Hotel, asserting that he and Daisy have a history that Gatsby could never understand. In addition to that, he announces to his wife that Gatsby is a criminal whose fortune comes from bootlegging alcoholand other illegal activities. Daisy realizes that her allegiance is to Tom, and Tom contemptuously sends her back to East Egg with Gatsby, attempting to prove that Gatsby cannot hurt him.
When Nick, Jordan, and Tom drive through the valley of ashes on their way home, they discover that Gatsby's car has struck and killed Tom's mistress, Myrtle. Nick later learns from Gatsby that Daisy, not Gatsby himself, was driving the car at the time of the accident but Gatsby intended to take the blame anyway. Myrtle's husband, George, falsely concludes that the driver of the yellow car is the secret lover he recently began suspecting she has, and sets out on foot to find him. After finding out the yellow car is Gatsby's, he arrives at Gatsby's mansion where he fatally shoots Gatsby and then himself. Nick stages an unsettlingly small funeral for Gatsby in which none of Gatsby's associates or partygoers attend. Later, Nick runs into Tom in New York and finds out that Tom had told George that Gatsby was Myrtle's secret lover and that Gatsby had killed her, then gave Gatsby's address to George. Nick breaks up with Jordan, and, disillusioned with the East, moves back to the Midwest.
Nick Carraway – a Yale graduate originating from the Midwest, a World War I veteran, and, at the start of the plot, a newly arrived resident of West Egg, who is aged 29 (later 30). He also serves as the first-person narrator of the novel. He is Gatsby's next-door neighbor and a bond salesman. He is easy-going, occasionally sarcastic, and somewhat optimistic, although this latter quality fades as the novel progresses.
Jay Gatsby (originally James "Jimmy" Gatz) – a young, mysterious millionaire with shady business connections (later revealed to be abootlegger), originally from North Dakota. He is obsessed with Daisy Buchanan, a beautiful debutante from Louisville, Kentucky whom he had met when he was a young military officer stationed at the Army's Camp Taylor in Louisville during World War I. Fitzgerald himself was actually based at Camp Taylor in Louisville when he was in the Army and makes various references to Louisville in the novel, including the Seelbach Hotel where the Buchanan party stayed while in town for Tom and Daisy's wedding. The character is based on the bootlegger and former World War I officer, Max Gerlach, according to Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, Matthew J. Bruccoli's biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Gatsby is said to have briefly studied at Trinity College, Oxford in England after the end of World War I.
Daisy Fay Buchanan – an attractive and effervescent, if shallow and self-absorbed, young Louisville, Kentucky debutante and socialite, identified as a flapper.[13] She is Nick's second cousin, once removed, and the wife of Tom Buchanan. Daisy is believed to have been inspired by Fitzgerald's own youthful romances with Ginevra King. Daisy once had a romantic relationship with Gatsby, before she married Tom. Her choice between Gatsby and Tom is one of the central conflicts in the novel.
Thomas "Tom" Buchanan – a millionaire who lives on East Egg, and Daisy's husband. Tom is an imposing man of muscular build with a "husky tenor" voice and arrogant demeanor. He is a former football star at Yale. Buchanan has parallels with William Mitchell, the Chicagoan who married Ginevra King. Buchanan and Mitchell were both Chicagoans with an interest in polo. Like Ginevra's father, whom Fitzgerald resented, Buchanan attended Yale and is a white supremacist.
Jordan Baker – Daisy Buchanan's long-time friend with "autumn-leaf yellow" hair, a firm athletic body, and an aloof attitude. She is Nick Carraway's girlfriend for most of the novel and an amateur golfer with a slightly shady reputation and a penchant for untruthfulness. Fitzgerald told Maxwell Perkins that Jordan was based on the golfer Edith Cummings, a friend of Ginevra King. Her name is a play on the two popular automobile brands, the Jordan Motor Car Company and the Baker Motor Vehicle, alluding to Jordan's "fast" reputation and the freedom now presented to Americans, especially women, in the 1920s.
George B. Wilson – a mechanic and owner of a garage. He is disliked by both his wife, Myrtle Wilson, and Tom Buchanan, who describes him as "so dumb he doesn't know he's alive". One interpretation of the novel's ending is that he learns of the death of his wife, he shoots and kills Gatsby, wrongly believing he had been driving the car that killed Myrtle, and then kills himself.
Myrtle Wilson – George's wife, and Tom Buchanan's mistress. Myrtle, who possesses a fierce vitality, is desperate to find refuge from her complacent marriage, but unfortunately this leads to her tragic ending. She is accidentally killed by Gatsby's car (driven by Daisy, though Gatsby insists he would take the blame for the accident).
Meyer Wolfshiem – a Jewish friend and mentor of Gatsby's, described as a gambler who fixed the World Series. Wolfshiem appears only twice in the novel, the second time refusing to attend Gatsby's funeral. He is a clear allusion to Arnold Rothstein, a New York crime kingpin who was notoriously blamed for the Black Sox Scandal which tainted the 1919 World Series.