The Spirited Versus The Dispirited--The Mythic Tradition In The Great Gatsby

Mythology is the spiritual home of mankind. As the product of human beings at their infant age, it has become the key to revealing the mystery and forecasting the future in historical course, and the single cure to the disease of modern industrial civilization. The intuitional empathy that the primitive people had with nature and the harmonious state between the two when they fused and participated into each other seem like a remote calling, an eternal oasis in people's mind. In face of the fury, disorder and alienation prevailing in modern times, more and more writers turn to the past for a solution. Among many who are sensitive and responsible, F. Scott Fitzgerald resorts to mythology as a way out of the spiritual desert.The Great Gatsby, his masterpiece, has received an ever- increasing attention since its appearance. Now it is crowned as one of the most important books in American literature, not so much because it mirrors the 1920s in America as because it bases on the prototype of Gatsby to reveal the disillusion of the American Dream, and an even larger theme of the human plight of struggle for what will never come true so as to show the author's great concern over the human fate, which also enhances the short story to the height of mythology. Gatsby, with his ever-lasting dream and his perseverant pursuit for it, is apotheosized to be the source of hope, the embodiment of revival of mankind. The body of this thesis falls into three parts, with a view to discussing the close relation between the novel and the mythic tradition from the aspects of characterization, narrative pattern and the style features respectively.The protagonist of the novel is surprisingly parallel to some mythological figures in the matter of personality, background and destiny. The first part of the thesis tries to explain the bondage of the novel with myth on three levels: the Greek myth, the Christian myth and the myth of the nation of America. The thesis dwells on the relation from the mythopoeic point of view as well.There are several pairs of binary forces in the narrative structure of The Great Gatsby. The past and the present intervene into each other: the real and the romantic combine together. The personal destiny reflects the history of a whole nation, and the individual experience embodies the plight of human existence. The thesis describes in detail the use of the binary forcesin its second part, and analyzes how the contradictions function together in the same work, which results in a freedom of the novel from the time and individual limit to achieve an aesthetic universality and eternality.Various devices are used in The Great Gatsby, such as bard-like repetition, symbolism and imagination, the accumulative effect of which is a piece of writing both elegant and solemn in tone. The third part devotes itself to the analysis of these features and especially introduces the concept of primitive-mythic thought to clarify the fact that either symbolism or imagination has its roots in the peculiar way of thinking of the primitive mythology, so that the novel falls in line with the tradition of mythology not only in its subject and theme, but also in its writing skills.