| F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) is a famous American writer in the first half of the twentieth century. He is regarded as one of the spokesmen for "the Lost Generation" in American literature. The Americans he stands for initially have a good expectation about the world, only to find "all gods dead, all wars fought, all faith in man shaken". Fitzgerald's writings caught the tone of the age, and his Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) gave its name to an important historical period in the history of the country. In 1925, he published his masterpiece The Great Gats by. Gatsby's personal life has assumed a magnitude as a "cultural-historical allegory" for the nation1.This thesis is mainly on Fitzgerald's intricate art of writing, and it is divided into three parts. The first part gives an overall view of F. Scott Fitzgerald as a writer, his main achievements, and a brief introduction of The Great Gatsby. The second part is to analyze Fitzgerald's writing technique: concerning the time arrangement and the mobile backgrounds of main characters, the narration methods and symbols. The third part is a summering-up.The Great Gatsby represents Fitzgerald's distinctive handling of time. He makes readers unconscious of time, yet the novel is filledwith clocks and schedules and timetables, and illusions to the time of day and night. The novel progresses seasonally, from spring to autumn, accompanied with the changes of main characters' fates. It is also informed by the recall of other time and other seasons, particularly the autumns of the past where the novel's meanings are concentrated. A sense of the past lingers in the work. For example, there are conversations overheard at Gatsby's parties of his mysterious past; Jordan Baker relates the events of October 1917, when she witnessed a fragment of the affair between Daisy and Gatsby, and so on. Fitzgerald uses time to dramatize and complement his theme, by having the novel proceed forward by simultaneously moving further and further back into the past, to the ultimate sources of illusion.Fitzgerald has affected the reader's reaction to the society he depicts through the mobile backgrounds of his chief characters. The Buchanans, for example, are married in Louisville, honeymoon for several months in the South Seas, and then in California, move on to France, and then to Chicago, before coming East. Carraway grows up in the Midwest, attends college in the East, returns to the Midwest, and later migrates east, to settle on the Island, before returning west again. Gatsby was once James Gatz, his boyhood spent on a Midwest farm, before he becomes a drifter in Michigan, meets Dan Cody, and circles the continent aboard Cody's yacht. During the war, he is stationed near Louisville, is then in combat overseas, and later still attends Oxford for a time, before coming to New York, where he meets Meyer Wolfsheimand acquires a mansion on the Island. The continual changes of address, and shiftings about, of the Buchanans and Gatsby and others are indicative of their restless, mobile society, which their personal backgrounds help to characterize.Fitzgerald has a very unique way of arrange his novel. We don't meet the protagonist until about a quarter of the way into the story. But before we actually meet him, there is elaborate description of his context. Meanwhile, Fitzgerald uses the modified first-person narrator in The great Gatsby. Nick Carraway is charged with relating the story as he sees it, reconstructing by some means whatever he himself has been unable to witness.Fitzgerald is skillful at using natural symbols growing out of the action and situation of the story: for example, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, the "green light" of Daisy Buchanan, the gray ashes where George Wilson's garage is built and his wife is killed.In conclusion, Fitzgerald has greatly achieved in using the device of a "dual hero"-that is, a first person narrator who himself represents one aspect of Fitzgerald's moral vision. Using the methods of impressionism and symbolic narrative rathe...
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