A Soul-stirring Tragedy

Francis Scott Fitzgerald is known as the spokesman for the Jazz Age of the1920s. His masterpiece The Great Gatsby is considered to be "the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James"(Nowlin,2007:60). The novel is hotly discussed from the aspects of writing skills, the theme, the main characters and the literary theories. As an outstanding tragedy, The Great Gatsby has not been studied from the perspective of theory of tragedy. Based on Aristotle’s The Poetics, this thesis tries to analyze The Great Gatsby from the perspective of Aristotle’s theory of tragedy. From the analysis, we can easily get the conclusion that The Great Gatsby is a soul-stirring novel in terms of theory of tragedy. Therefore, the novel can be more widely accepted and appreciated as a tragedy.Fitzgerald embodies and meanwhile develops Aristotle’s theory of tragedy in The Great Gatsby. The novel is an imitation of the social atmosphere and the people in the1920s America, which coincides with Aristotle’s definition of tragedy. He says that tragedy is a form of imitation. Fitzgerald, however, enlarges the imitation from merely actions to a broader scope. The whole society, the character of people and the experiences of people become the object of imitation. Following the law of probability and necessity, which Aristotle stresses in The Poetics, Gatsby’s fortune changes from good to bad and the whole story is arranged properly.In The Poetics, Aristotle thinks that a tragedy should include some elements. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby embodies and develops the elements of a tragedy: The story of The Great Gatsby, as whole, has a beginning, a middle and an end to achieve the unity of plot; Gatsby as the protagonist is well descried as a not eminently good and just man in character; Symbolism as a form of diction, instead of metaphor is widely used in the novel. Since the spectacle is least connected with literature, this thesis will not do any deep analysis on it. The above elements create a tragic atmosphere of the novel and they strengthen the tragic emotion of the reader, in addition, they are beneficial to highlight the effect of tragedy.Besides the definition and elements of tragedy, Aristotle offers in The Poetics that the aim of a tragedy is to arouse fear and pity. In The Great Gatsby, through the arrangement of Complication and Unraveling, Reversal and Recognition, Fitzgerald reaches the aim of arousing the emotion of fear and pity.