A Conceptual Blending Approach To F.Scott Fitzgerald’s Personal Tendency

Francis Scott Fitzgerald, was regarded as the spokesman of the Jazz Age. With his life experiences and close observation, Fitzgerald unmasked the hypocrisy and emptiness of the American society in the 1920 s under the superficial uproar and vanity in the name of the American dream. In his works, he examined the entire generation’s search for the elusive American dream of wealth and happiness, and scrutinized the consequences of the generation’s adherence to false values. Many characters in his works pursued a life of luxury and dissipation, however, such pursuit would inevitably be smashed by the relentless reality.It is commonly believed that The Great Gatsby was a great American novel and Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. Tender Is the Night took Fitzgerald seven years’ pain. It was his semi-autobiography, and also the one he expected of a lot. In these two novels, Fitzgerald expressed his attitude and personal feelings towards the American dream with the theme that dream could never be achieved under that social situation.This thesis aims to reveal Fitzgerald’s particular voice and style from the viewpoint of conceptual metaphor, which is based on the theories of cognitive linguistics. The theory of conceptual metaphor was first extensively explored in Metaphors We Live By written by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980. They held that conceptual metaphor typically employed a more concrete concept as source and a more abstract concept as target to generate a cross-domain mapping. Metaphor was not a simple linguistic phenomenon but the foundation of mankind’s concept and ways of thinking which constituted the important means to understand our world.The thesis consists of five parts. The part of Introduction introduces previous studies on Fitzgerald’s works and the theory used in this thesis. Chapter One is about the general knowledge of the American dream, Fitzgerald as a dreamer, and the American dream theme in Fitzgerald’s novels from the perspective of conceptual metaphor. Chapter Two focuses on the application of conceptual metaphor to the two novels in terms of the main characters. Fitzgerald incorporated in his novels both his life experiences and his point of views on the American dream of the 20 th century in America. Chapter Three analyzes in detail Fitzgerald’s effective use of different kinds of conceptual metaphors to build the characters and develop the story. Conceptual metaphors such as scene metaphor, name metaphor and color metaphor are exclusively and precisely investigated. From the detailed expounding on the conceptual metaphors in the two novels we see that conceptual metaphor is a basic way to understand and reflect the world, which makes up the Conclusion part.