The Music And Fitzgerald's Writing

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was the representative writer of "the Lost Generation" in America, and was the spokesman for American younger generation in "the Jazz Age". As a writer nurtured by American culture and "American Dream", he wrote the Great Gatsby &Tender Is the Night as representative of his novels, and other short stories. His works profoundly anatomized the adventure value in that age through the wreckage of "American Dream". As "the most sensitive social novelist in America", and a writer with "unique romantic style", his works were closely connected with the music. This thesis emphatically studies the relation between the music and Fitzgerald's writing.First, the thesis discusses the music's form of expression in Fitzgerald's writing. The thesis shows that Fitzgerald often used music characters for reference to strengthen the expressive force of the narrative text. Concretely, there were various forms that Fitzgerald learned from the music in his novels. He not only combined the music with the narration, making the music content as an organic part of the novel plot; but also learned the structure skill of the music, making the novel as the structural musical works by mixing the art of music composition into the novel writing. Music content included the artificial music, sounds of nature and some music terms & symbols appearing intermittently. Music structure was reflected by improvisation & reprise, polyphony, harmony & counterpoint and rondo. This showed that Fitzgerald's works were not only filled with the narration of music content represented by the Jazz, but also the narrative format naturally flew from the music riverbed. So his works were worthy of the name as the echo of "the Jazz Age".Second, the thesis interprets the music's meaning in Fitzgerald's novels. The music in Fitzgerald's works was not just an art ornament, a manner that added luster to the works, but had merged into the novels in complete harmony, and been taken as the main body of the novels by Fitzgerald. In the sense of aesthetics, the word music in the novels provided the frame and pattern to comprehend the text for the readers, and seized the space sense in the narrative time for the text as well. It also aroused human's emotion directly, expressed thesecret in character's heart, and conveyed the mutual response between the impersonality world and the personality world. The abundant music in the novels also initiated the readers' expectation and aftertaste, and leaded them to imagine and participate.Third, the thesis questions closely why there is so much music in his writing. As we know, there were many reasons for Fitzgerald to learn many content and structural characters from the music. The age background, personal life experience, and the novel writing tradition all influenced him, and made him a novelist with music tendency. The natural revelation of personal emotion made his works the singular integration of literature and music to a certain extent.This thesis also shows that Fitzgerald used a method of "double vision" to treat with the music. He thoroughly expressed his divisive feeling to the social reality through the "double vision". Not only was he intoxicated with the improvisational music represented by the Jazz, but also realized the implication------the wreckage of life ideal and "American Dream". This is Fitzgerald'sambivalent and uniform vision, and music is most suitable to express this errant thought. Moreover, music's affect to Fitzgerald's writing gives us an enlightenment: though music and literature belong to different art forms, the learning from each other can complement them two. So the combination is worth carrying forward.