An Analysis Of Tender Is The Night From The Perspective Of Consumer Society Theory

Francis Scott key Fitzgerald,one of the most eminent writers in American literature,is hailed as “the spokesman of the Jazz Age”.He is a typical representative expatriate writer of Lost Generation in the 1920 s.The thesis takes Fitzgerald's novel Tender Is the Night as the research object,using Baudrillard's Consumer Society Theory to analyze the fate of the main characters in the novel in the era when consumer culture began to prevail,thus revealing the great impact the consumer society has on human existence and the spiritual world.The phenomenon of materialism and spiritual wasteland in Tender Is the Night deserves our attention.Fitzgerald's accurate observation of the ascendant bourgeoisie's and the description of realism at that time are still inspiring to our contemporary materialistic society.The French theorist Baudrillard incorporates the ideas of sociology and semiotics to form his unique Consumer Society Theory,which renders us a better understanding of the endless sign consumption,the alienated human relations and the causes of tragedies in the novel.This thesis consists of six parts.The introduction part introduces the celebrated American writer Fitzgerald and his work Tender Is the Night,and presents the structure of the thesis.The first chapter discusses the origin and the definition of Baudrillard's Consumer Society Theory,and focuses on three major characteristics of the consumer society: sign consumption,commoditized human relations and hedonism.The next three chapters are the main part of this thesis,which is to apply the theory to the text.The second chapter explores the relationship between people and commodities in the novel based on the sign consumption of Consumer Society Theory by explaining how the protagonists use the consumption of commodities and leisure activities to construct identity.The third chapter reveals the commoditized relationships under the influence of the consumer society by describing characters' money-oriented marriage,disillusioned love affair,and distorted friendship respectively.The fourth chapter probes into morbid mindset of the three protagonists influenced by the hedonistic values of the consumer society and spiritual wasteland.The sixth part is the conclusion and sublimation of the main motif of this paper: the study holds that the characters in Tender Is the Night are overwhelmed by materialistic consumerism,and eventually lost in the consumer society.Fitzgerald inspires contemporary people to take good care of spiritual world while pursuing material abundance.