Dance On The Grave-an Existential Reading Of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

As a spokesman of the Jazz Age and a representative writer of the Lost Generation, F.Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was among the most important modern writers in Americanliterature. His masterpiece The Great Gatsby was published in1925, which achieved inevery aspect the peak of his writing skills and later established his permanent position inAmerican literature. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald successfully captured the wind with“hedonism” that blew in America in the1920’s and tried to reveal the disillusionment of“American Dream” and people’s spiritual predicament in postwar time. This novel hasbeen discussed by many critics mainly from angles of themes, symbolism, narrativetechniques and figures who had great influence on the author. In recent years there hasbeen researches on The Great Gatsby from the perspectives of feminism, de-familiarization,carnival theory, prototype theory and new-historism, but few discerned the existentialthoughts embedded in this works. In the realm of existential thinking, this thesis aims toanalyze characters’ spiritual predicament in an absurd and alienated world and focuses onpeople’s responsibility after making choices through their free will.