英美文学选读学习笔记 Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was a most resentative figure of the 1920s, who was mirror of the exciting age in almost every way. An active participant of his age, he never failed to remain detached and foresee the failure and tragedy of the "Dollar Decade." Thus he is often acclaimed literary spokesman of the Jazz Age.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on Sep. 24, 1896. In his childhood, he admired his gentlemanly father who retained his upper-class manners despite numerous commercial failures, but was always a little sensitive to the poor Irish beginnings on his mother's side. The legacy from his grandfather provided him with an expensive education in private schools at Princeton. But due to illness and neglect of academic study, he left the university in 1917 without graduation. Then he accepted an army commission and spent fifteen months of service in the southern state of Alabama.

Fitzgerald learnt to exploit his literary talent very early in his life. A juvenile as he was, he wrote short stories to magazines and produced plays for public performance. In 1920, his first novel This Side of Paradise was published, which was, to some extent, his own story. The novel was so successful that it won for him not only wealth and fame, but also the expensive prize of Zelda Sayre, the beautiful, light-hearted daughter of a prominent judge. Zelda exerted a strong influence on Fitzgerald so far as his literary career as well as his personal life is concerned. She has been regarded as the proto type of a series of rich, beautiful women who figure so prominently in his fiction. After marriage the young couple frequently went abroad and lived extravagantly a luxurious life. To keep earning enough money, Fitzgerald wrote short stories and novels at a rapid speed. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, coming out in 1922, increased his popularity. Following a similar theme seen in This Side of Paradise, it portrays the emotional and spiritual collapse of a wealthy young man during an unstable marriage. The couple in the novel were undoubtedly modeled after Fitzgerald himself and Zelda. It was a sort of first attempt at writing his masterpiece The Great Gatsby (1925), which made him one of the greatest American novelists. Afterwards, Fitzgerald wrote one more important novel Tender is the Night (1934), in which he traces the decline of a young American psychiatrist whose marriage to a beautiful and wealthy patient drains his personal energies and corrodes his professional career. The 1930s brought relentless decline for Fitzgerald with a series of misfortunes: his reputation declined, his wealth fell, his health failed, and what's more, Zelda had suffered from some serious mental breakdowns which confined her in a sanitarium for the rest of her life. Alcoholism, loneliness and despair combined to ruin him. He died in 1940 of a heart attack, leaving his last novel The Last Tycoon unfinished.

Fitzgerald was thought of in his day as a short-story writer, too. His short-story collections won him great popularity, such as Flappers and Philosophers (1921), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), All the Sad Young Men (1926) and Taps at Reveille (1935). One of his best short stories is "Babylon Revisited," which depicts an American's return to Paris in the 1930s and his regretful realization that the past is beyond his reach, since he can neither alter it nor make any amends.

Most critics have agreed that Fitzgerald is both an insider and an outsider of the Jazz Age with a double vision. He lived in his great moments and joined the big party in the 1920s, partaking of the wealth, frivolity, temptations of the time, while reproducing the drama of the age by standing aloof and keeping a cold eye on the performance of his contemporaries. He drank and did crazy things after he got drunk, whereas staying sober enough to see the corruptive nature of the society and the vanity fair that everyone, including himself, was infatuated with. This doubleness or irony is one of the distinguishing marks as a writer and helps Fitzgerald to sent a panorama of the Jazz Age with a deep insight.

Fitzgerald's fictional world is the best embodiment of the spirit of the Jazz Age, in which he shows a particular interest in the upper-class society, especially the upper-class young people.  Young men and women in the 1920s had a sense of reckless confidence not only about money but about life in general. Since they grew up with the notion that the world would' improve without their help, they felt excused from seeking the common good. Plunging into their personal adventures, engaging themselves in casual sex and heavy drinking, they took risks that did not imss them as being risks, and they spent money extravagantly and enjoyed themselves to their hearts' content. But beneath their masks of relaxation and joviality there was only sterility, meaninglessness and futility, and amid the grandeur and extravagance a spiritual wasteland and a hint of decadence and moral decay. This undeniable juxtaposition of appearance with reality, of the tense of gaiety with the tension underneath, is easily recognizable in Fitzgerald's novels and stories.

Fitzgerald never spared an intimate touch in his fiction to deal with the bankruptcy of the American Dream, which is highlighted by the disillusionment of the protagonists' personal dreams due to the clashes between their romantic vision of life and the sordid reality. A great number of his stories started with the basic situation in which a rising young man of the middle class is in love with the daughter of a very rich family. The young man is not attracted by the fortune in itself; he is not seeking money so much as what money can bring to him; and he loves the girl not so much as he loves what the girl symbolizes. Money is only a convenient and inadequate symbol for what he dreams of earning, and love merely a vehicle that can transport him to a magic world of eternal happiness. The man's real dream, as Malcolm Cowley suggested, is that of achieving a new status and a new essence, of rising to a loftier place in the mysterious hierarchy of human worth. That is why Daisy Buchanan seems so charming to Gatsby and that is why Gatsby has directed his whole life to winning back her love. Although the protagonist's pursuit of his dream only proves to be futile since what he seeks is nothing but an illusion, and even a nightmare in some cases, Fitzgerald does not negate the affirmative role the "magic moments" play, which attend the hope and expectations of eternal happiness.

Fitzgerald is a great stylist in American literature. His style, closely related to his themes, is explicit and chilly. His accurate dialogues, his careful observation of mannerism, styles, models and attitudes provide the reader with a vivid sense of reality. He follows the Jamesian tradition in using the scenic method in his chapters, each one of which consists of one or more dramatic scenes, sometimes with intervening passages of narration, leaving the tedious process of transition to the readers' imagination. He also skillfully employs the device of having events observed by a "central consciousness’’ to his great advantage. The accurate details, the completely original diction and metaphors, the bold imssionistic and colorful quality have all proved his consummate artistry.