| This paper intends to analyze the symbolic function of machines and the ossified social order constructed machines in F.Scott Fitzgerald's representative work The Great Gatsby.Taking the lavish Jazz Age as its background,this novel depicts the mental outlook and moral degeneration in this time and touches on the description of the machines that are endowed with profound meanings,and portrays an epitome of rigid and mechanical society.Human destiny is duplicated just like a machine component,which reflects the ethical predicament.So from the ethical literary criticism perspective,this novel is essentially an ethical narration of the transitional American society.Fitzgerald's attention to machines runs through the whole novel.Cars,telephones and other machines sketch an extravagant outline of the Jazz Age,and meanwhile characters' uses of machines reflect the moral decline of the society.The arrangement of characters' destinies has been doomed and cannot be changed,thus constructed a paralyzed and mechanized ethical order of modern society.There are five parts in this thesis.The first part briefly introduces Fitzgerald's life experience and works,as well as the literature review and theoretical basis.The second part sketches the ethical environment combined with machines from the material and spiritual aspects.The third part focuses on the exploration of the construction of the ethical identities of characters and the ethical order by machines from a microscopic level.The fourth part aims at revealing the profound tragic reality from a macroscopic level that the mechanized ethical order results in characters' ethical predicaments in the choice of dream,marriage and family,and the pursuit for American Dream are doomed to be failed.The final part discloses the crisis caused by visible and invisible machines in modern society based on the thesis and makes an introspection on the restraints ofmodern mechanical civilization. |
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