| Since Francis Scott Fitzgerald had his masterpiece The Great Gatsby published in 1925, it had won many favorable praises. Now people keep reading it and the researches on it are inexaustible. This present thesis will offer a re-reading of The Great Gatsby from a structuralist perspective.The thesis is composed of five chapters. The first chapter is an introduction to Fitzgerald, the brief summary of The Great Gatsby and the historical review of it. For a long time, The Great Gatsby was classified as "a book of roaring Twenties," a product of the times. Most criticisms seek its particular meaning against the background of history. Structuralist analysis differs from the criticisms on the matter that it is no longer the description of a particular work, but the establishment of a theory of the structure or general laws within literature itself.Chapter Two focuses on the theories of Structuralism. Structuralism sees itself as a human science whose effort is to understand in a systematic way the fundamental structures that underlie all human experience and all human behaviour. Literature offers the most obvious manifestation of Structuralism in action and Structuralism mainly deals with narrative. In terms of narrative analysis, both Greimas and Todorov think there exists, at a deep level, a "grammar" of narrative from which individual stories ultimately derive. The stories can be X-rayed through the "grammar." Both of them focus on the "unity" and "wholeness" of the fiction, the integration of content and form. But they separately emphasize the "semantic" and "syntactic" aspects of narrative: Greimas is interested in content, Todorov, form. These two must be joined together to form narrative and the "grammar" explored in thesis can be completed.Binary oppositions function as the basis of Structuralism, on which Greimas' theory rests. Greimas observes that human beings make meaning by structuringthe world in terms of opposed pairs. He believes that this fundamental structure of binary oppositions, that is, the oppositional structure, shapes our language, our experience, and the narratives through which we articulate our experience. The ultimate goal of Greimas' research is the establishment of the basic plot model. But the trial is not considered successful because the categories of opposition are analyzed simply on the surface level. Thus another level of "syntactic" analysis is required and Todorov's research achieves the goal.Todorov's idea is that "the whole text can be seen as a kind of sentence-structure." His analysis of stories reveals two fundamental units of structure: propositions and sequences, which function as "sentences" and "paragraphs" respectively and they make up of the text. In this way, characters can be seen as nouns, their attributes as adjectives and their actions, verbs. Then all the actions in the novel are examined to explore the common elements and the pattern structuring them.Chapter Three is the narrative analysis of The Great Gatsby with binary oppositions, which structure not only The Great Gatsby but first Fitzgerald himself. Since binary oppositions shape our experience and each writer's experience will inevitably exert influence on his work, the work can not be analysed in isolation, being totally separated with its author. Fitzgerald's life experience, like his fiction, is a blend of romance and realism, success and failure. The duality of his personality is an undercurrent beneath the novel. Furthermore The Great Gatsby is an excellent embodiment of binary oppositions which underlie its theme, setting, characters and the meaning of symbols: illusion and disillusionment in theme; ideal land and realistic world in setting; insiders and outsiders in characters; superficial meaning and implied meaning in symbols. These opposed pairs serve as good illustrations of the deep oppositional structure underlying the novel.Chapter Four seeks the narrative pattern The Great Gatsby presents. The action of each character is carefully examined: Jay Gatsby, the title hero, seeks...
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