A Stylistic Study Of The Great Gatsby With Reference To Its Theme

F. Scott Fitzgerald is widely praised as the finest and most celebrated novelist of the twentieth century America. Fitzgerald's masterpiece The Great Gatsby, referred to as "The Great American Novel", stands as the supreme achievement of his career. The Great Gatsby is the classic novel about the American Dream, one of the great novels of the 20th Century as it captures perfectly some essential quality of the American myth and dream of the Jazz Age. The novel has profoundly portrayed the unsatisfied desire of the wealth and the success and displayed the theme of the novel— the disillusion of American dream. Meanwhile, it also shows Fitzgerald's outstanding talent and the writing technique incisively. His style is exquisite, and the plot is compelling. The splendid work establishes Fitzgerald as a great writer in American literature.Fitzgerald's novel reveals his poetic temperament and style. His observation to the world is exquisite. Throughout his work, Fitzgerald's writing style is impressionistic, for his details evoke sensory responses in the reader and in other places, Fitzgerald's style evokes mood. This thesis studies The Great Gatsby with reference to its theme from the literary stylistic approach.The thesis can be divided into four chapters. In Chapter One, relevant theories have been surveyed, and then some information about Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby has been presented.Chapter Two applies Geoffrey N. Leech and Michael H. Short's method of analysis as the framework to the study of the stylistic features of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, consisting of four categories: lexical categories, grammatical categories, figures of speech, and cohesion and context, according to which a text can be systematically evaluated. First, on the lexical level, we study the employment of adjectives by Fitzgerald. Secondly, on the grammatical level, we further discuss the negative effect and the sentence structures in the work. Thirdly, symbolism and irony are the major traditional stylistic approaches in view of figure of speech. On the level of cohesion and context, the whole novel is...