An Empirical Study On Fiction Language From A Stylistic Perspective

The Great Gatsby, the masterpiece of F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a key document of the American 1920s.With its large assimilation of the twenties era, The Great Gatsby gives that era a historical definition and at the same time, its clarity, vitality and stylistic brilliance arouse enormous interest and admiration in readers and attract a great many critics to the exploration of its incomparable charm.This thesis, with a detailed stylistic analysis of The Great Gatsby, aims to explain how the meaning, the beauty and the strength of the novel are created through the writer's linguistic choices and narrative techniques, and to prove that it is of great help and necessity to apply stylistics to the appreciation of a literary work.The thesis tries to adopt the method used by Leech and Short in their book Style in Fiction to make a relatively overall and objective analysis of the novel's language. The four categories for analysis are: lexical category, grammatical category, figure of speech, cohesion and context.As far as the lexical features are concerned, the author employs special lexical items such as abstract nouns and French words to depict American society as full of purposeless movement, lavishness, casual wrecks and moral decadence. Lexical clusters related to different semantic features are exploited to outline Gatsby's idealistic and tragic image and the Buchanans'restlessness, superficiality and spiritual desolation, which foreground the contrast of the American Dream and its corruption. The lexical deviation and word connotations are mainly used for characterization and theme revelation.In terms of the syntactical aspects, narrative sentence type and the contrast of registers are employed to portray characters and to establish distances between the narrator, the characters, and the readers. Fitzgerald's narrative sentence type is comparatively long and formal, the complexity of which is vivid in describing inner feelings and emotional changes, thus highlighting the narrator's lament over the corruption of the American Dream and his admiration for the hero, a symbol of the American Dream. The employment of the contrasts of registers, on the other hand, creates thematic values and strong stylistic effects, and helps to portray personalities of different characters, thus serving as a useful means of characterization. The author's sentence endings in The Great Gatsby are frequently constructed with elaborate appositions, which cultivate sensation, create a virtual world of romance; while his employment of prepositional phrases provide an effective way to describe the surroundings and evoke moods, serving to generate suspense as well as to create interest and expectation on the part of the reader.As for figure of speech, the author used a lot of exotic metaphors, well presenting the character. Symbols run through the novel, making the story intact and echoing the novel's theme -- the American Dream and its corruption, spiritual and moral sterility.From the context perspective, point of view and modes of speech presentation are used to produce special stylistic effects. In the category of point of view, the author makes use of both limited first-person witness perspective and shifts of narrative perspective -- the adoption of these narrative techniques is closely related to the theme of the novel. The main part of The Great Gatsby is narrated from Nick's limited first-person witness point of view, which offers the novel immediacy, credibility and authenticity, and more importantly, through which the author's attitude toward the current American society and the hero is revealed. At the same time, the narrative limitations arising from limited first-person witness narration are largely supplemented by shifts of narrative perspectives. The conscious shifts of point of view in the novel provide the reader some necessary background information of the characters, and sometimes sustain interest and create suspense in the novel.Modes of speech presentation in the novel, which involve Direct Speech, Indirect Speech, Free Indirect Speech and Free Direct Speech, serve to adjust distance or create stylistic effects the author aims to achieve. Among these different modes, Direct Speech dominates a prominent space in the novel, which profoundly contributes to the vivid portrayal of characters, and the generation of excellent acoustic effects. But other speech modes are also adopted in the novel and play their distinctive roles in adjusting distance, depicting characters, or embodying the theme of the novel.Generally speaking, with literary stylistics as an analysis tool, we are more aware that Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is an artistic success, and this success is admittedly related with his superb writing style. From the analysis and illustration of The Great Gatsby from a stylistic perspective, we can draw a conclusion that applying stylistics to the interpretation and appreciation of a literary work will enable us to have a more profound, penetrating and insightful understanding of the theme and the aesthetics value of the work. Therefore it is of great use and necessity to introduce stylistics into literary interpretation and appreciation.