The Great Gatsby에 나타난 Gatsby의 꿈과 현실 = Gatsby's Dream and Reality in The Great Gatsby

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul Minnesota in 1896. The first of his novels This Side of Paradise(1920) was followed by two volumes of short stories, and at last The Great Gatsby(1925), which alone would assure Fitzgerald's place among our writers of major stature. He died in 1940 and gave a name to an age-the Jazz Age-lived through that age, and saw it burn itself out. Although his finest works were to come-The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, the unfinished The Last Tycoon, there would be tragedy in the remainder of his life. The extent of his literary success was not recognizd by critics until after his death in the early 40's.
In The Great Gatsby the motive of an impossible dream of love, which riches can not fulfill after the right movement has passed forever, finds its definitive consecration. Fitzgerald reveals the tragic implications of that dream by organizing the plot around an agonizing conflict of the moral and social order and by enlarging its meaning on the symbol level of legend and myth. The story is rooted in an objective frame of references and thus acquires an individual, realistic meaning which is immediately apparent on the literal level. But it attains an even larger significance on the symbolic level by carrying to its tragic solution a conflict of characters which has a universal implication and representative value.
Gatsby's dream can be divided into three basic and related parts : the desire to repeat the past, the desire for money, and the desire for incarnation of unutterable visions in the material earth-to go to the past, meet Daisy and get married as if it were five years ago. There is one problem, we can say. What is the basis for the mutual attraction between Daisy and Gatsby? But there can be another problem. The true question is not what Gatsby sees in Daisy, but the direction he takes from her, what sees beyond her. For Gatsby, Daisy does not exist in herself. She is the green light that signals him into the heart of his ultimate vision. The green light that is visible at night across the bay from the windows and lawn of Gatsby's house is the centural symbol in the book.
Superficially this novel deals once more with the failure of a dream of love, which can not be fulfilled to last by the acquisition of money. But Gatsby's failure has a deeper and more comlex motivation in a subtler interplay of human and social conflict, and his constitutional weakness finds a tragic counterpart in them. In this cleavage, between the innocence of Gatsby's dream and the corruption of his practical ways is to be found Gatsby's hamartia, his tragic flaw.
Nick Carraway, the narrator in this novel, realizes at the end of this novel that Gatsby's illusion can be identified with the illusion or the dream of the early Dutch sailor, entranced by their vision of the New World. Even though the houses as we see, for example, become inessential ; what matters is that Gatsby's story is identified with that of the pioneers. Though the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house have vanished, Gatsby's dream of illusion repeats in a modern context, their dream, which might have been after all an illusion, of building a new life for themselves, a new plcae in history where they could renew the past. The "green light" cherished by Gatsby is no only on Daisy's dock-it is also the green light of the orgiastic future. And that future ecedes before us,year by year, in the past, in the vast obscurity beyond the city, in the dark fields.