Salvation: A Paradoxical Archetype

Fitzgerald is considered the chronicler of the 1920s in America and the spokesman of the"Lost Generation". This is the most gorgeous and pleasure-seeking decade in which the traditional moral was abandoned and people felt spiritually disorientated. Fitzgerald was both a leading participant in the typically pleasure-seeking and money-making life of the 1920s, and at the same time, he was a self-conscious writer with detached observation of it and felt disillusioned with it.Fitzgerald is typically an autobiographic writer. He writes out of his own experience and his works are the vivid revelation of the contemporary society. His masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, is considered the record of the"Jazz Age". In the novel, Gatsby devotes to a pure dream; however, he becomes fallen by using evil means to achieve it. This paradox is also the projection of American history. The Americans become fallen while pursuing the ancestors'ideal society.The first American immigrants were the Puritans who came to the new continent to save themselves from the corrupt world and tried to rebuild the Garden of Eden on the earth. Along with the accumulation of wealth, they turned their back on the pure dream and fell into material opportunism. In the early 1920s, the young Americans attended the WWI with a good will to save the world. But the pure dream was shattered by the essence of the imperialist war. Though America enjoyed the economic boom and wealth abundance after the war, the young people, in particular, felt disoriented in spirit and became fallen in hedonism.This paradox is projected on the birth of religions and the Christian holly book---the Bible, which has greatly influenced the ideology in the west. The ancestors of man fell in the trap of religion during the process of seeking salvation. The Bible developed around God's salvation to the sinned world. In the Bible, Adam and Eve committed the original sin by eating the forbidden fruit to pursuit knowledge; Jesus'salvation to the world, however, resulted in betrayal and killing. This paradoxical salvation, which runs through the western literature, is a kind of"archetype", that is,"a typical or recurring image."...