《伟大的盖茨比》与《挪威的森林》比较研究.doc

伟大的盖茨比与挪威的森林比较研究A Comparative Study between The Great Gatsby and Norwegian WoodAbstract: The Great Gatsby, masterpiece of F. S. Fitzgerald, is a tale of a retired soldier and bootlegger whose obsessive aspiration of wealth and lost love is destroyed by a corrupt dream, “the American Dream.” Haruki Murakami, famous contemporary Japan novelist, completed his masterpiece Norwegian Wood in 1987, 1980s bestseller, a love story pervaded with adolescent melancholy and indifference and appalling tendency towards death. As one of Murakamis most admiring writer, F. Fitzgerald has inspired Murakami greatly with his work The Great Gatsby, such as the tragic consciousness during the creation of a novel.Key words: tragic comparison; sensual hedonism; generation gap; sublimation; disillusionment摘要：伟大的盖茨比是美国二十世纪初期伟大的小说家斯科特菲茨杰拉德的代表作，描述了一个二战退伍军人的金钱梦和想要重温的旧梦是怎样随着“美国梦”的破灭而破灭的。村上春树是日本当代声名显著的小说家，他的代表作挪威的森林是一部充满了青春伤逝和疏离感甚至可怕的死亡倾向的爱情小说。菲茨杰拉德是村上春树最为崇拜的美国作家之一，他们的这两部小说在悲剧意识上明显地相似。关键词：悲剧对比; 享乐主义; 代沟; 升华; 幻灭Contents. Introduction .1. Literature Reviews.1A. On Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby.2B. On Murakami and Norwegian Wood.4. Tragic Comparison between the Two Novels.6A. Tragedy of Sensual Hedonism.6B. Tragedy of Generation Gap, Focusing on the Son-Parent Relationship .8C. Sublimation and Disillusionment of the Tragic Deaths.101. Death Leads to Disillusionment.102. Tragedy Can Be Sublimated.11. Conclusion.12Works Cited.13. Introduction Haruki Murakami is a very famous contemporary Japan novelist, visiting professor of Princeton University in America. His works of fiction have swept Asia, especially Korea, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan regions, with astonishing readership since his 1979 maiden novel Hear the Wind Sing took the “Literary Prize for New Talents” the very year. Apart from this prize, he has been honored with “Noma Literature and Art Prize for New Talent”, and “Tanizaki Jun Literature Prize” and “Tokubai Literature Prize” among other pure literature prizes. In 1987, Murakami was even honored as the most popular young writer for his masterpiece Norwegian Wood, a love story pervaded with adolescent melancholy and indifference and appalling tendency towards death which became 1980s bestseller. Norwegian Wood had been sold more than eight million copies in Japan according to statistics of November 2004 made by Asahi News.F. Scott Fitzgerald is ranked among the greatest American writers of the 20th century. He is widely considered the literary spokesman of the “Jazz Age” the decade of the 1920s. The Great Gatsby, Fitzgeralds masterpiece, appeared in 1925, is a story of a retired soldier and bootlegger, Jay Gatsby, whose obsessive dream of wealth and lost love is destroyed by a corrupt dream, “the American Dream”, which put faith into everyone that even of the most humble origins, one can attain wealth and social standing in the U.S. through talent and individual initiative. Literature Reviews Though F. Scott Fitzgerald and Haruki Murakami arent contemporary with each other or from the same cultural backgrounds, Murakamis motherland Japan virtually had been once under the United States supervision for several decades after the Second World War during which Uncle Sams culture had influenced Japan greatly in many aspects. As for Murakami, born under the occupation and grew up with the incessant prospering country which hasnt stopped her admiration for the United States and “in the modern world of the literary sphere of Japan, no one else has paid greater homage to the modern novels of America”(尚 146). Nevertheless, few literary reviews have been written for the comparative study between Murakamis certain novel and some American novelists work. I have selected some documentation, books, papers, reviews respectively on Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby, Murakami and Norwegian Wood, anticipating providing a possible way to the further understanding of the two great novels.A.On Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby1.A paper written by Wang Xiaolan, a graduate oriented to the English and American Literature from Normal University of Anhui, researches into the representation and expression of the tragic heroes and their tragic fates in Fitzgeralds four completed novels. The author defines The Great Gatsby as “deepening tragedy” (王 144), and calls Gatsby an “idealist” (145). In the part analyzing The Great Gatsby, the author concludes that the subject of the conflict between the romantic life and ruthless realities always emerges in Fitzgeralds novels, and the tragedy of Gatsby comes after his childish fancy and fantasy for life and love, juvenile knowledge and understanding of the upper class (145).2.The paper completed by two teachers from Hangzhou Electronic Science and Technology University applies the so-called “theory of intertextuality”. As a postmodernist textual theory, it was put forward by French semiologist Julia Christiua in the Semiology, “the text of any work is seemingly constructed of a mosaic of many other texts and any text is the assimilation and transformation of other texts” (何, 袁 154). Then the authors quote the theory of intertextual criticism defined by Zhu Liyuan in his History of Western Aesthetics, “giving up the traditional critical method concentrating on the relation between the author and its work, turning to the cultural study between different texts in a comprehensive language contextso as to free the text from the so-called determinism of society or psychology and transfer it to the new critical environment to study it with all kinds of texts” (154).3.Narrative technique is a significant aspect of a literary work while applied with certain literary theory; it becomes much easier and more vivid for us to enjoy the charm of the text. Huang Wei, a postgraduate from Literature College of Normal University of Tianjin, applies the “literature theory of structuralism” (黄 109) and “narratology theory” to the speculation and analysis of the text of The Great Gatsby, “summing up clearly the common pattern of all the characters behavior as from pursuing to losing ” (109).4.As to the narrative device of The Great Gatsby, the narrator Nick Carrayway has drawn more and more attention nowadays. Sun Yanbin in his graduating thesis “carries out a meticulous and minute exploration of Nick who owns dual identities as narrator and a character in the story” and thinks it is of no significance to “equate the narrator with the writer coercively” (孙 374). The author “gives a new perspective” for the study of the novel by attributing “the character, skeptical and conservative and addictive in fancying, to one of the main characters and narrator Nick” (374). In the Foreign Literature History in the 20th Century edited by Zheng Kelu, it also highlights the employment of Nick as the viewer and narrator to be “the excellent point” (郑 424), as “Nick directly tells the story and determines the structure of it-the tale becomes confusing and intriguing because of his subtle relationships with the protagonist” (425). In summing up the artistic features of the novel, the author emphasizes on the so-called “general observation” observed by Fitzgerald himself “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function” (425).5.“Fitzgerald may be called a stereotype who is against the rationalism” (陈 31). In the end, the commentator concludes The Great Gatsby is “the contradictions between rationalism and irrationalism” and “reprimands on the obliteration of humans instinct and irrational energy by rationalism” (34).6.Symbolism is often employed in the works of fiction, true for The Great Gatsby. Both in the Foreign Literature History in the 20th Century and a graduate thesis “Simple Analysis on the Colors Symbolic Significance in The Great Gatsby” written by Li Xiaomei from Foreign Languge College of Lanzhou University, “green light” is firstly marked and analyzed. The latter thinks the symbolically employed colors “record the disenchantment of the American dream and the tragic destiny of the protagonist” (李 106).7.The criticism made by true specialists and critics in The Columbia History of the American Novel is the most valuable documentation that is available here and at present. A critic calls Fitzgerald “the simultaneous lyricist and demystifier of the modern American Dream” (Elliott 322). “Although Gatsby bears the modernistic hallmark of a clean, hard prose, its craft is less foregrounded and self-displaying” (323). As to the school of Fitzgerald, the novelist seems to takes a different literary heritage compared with Hemingway, with Hemingway choosing Huckleberry Finn while Fitzgerald taking Henry James and Theodore Dreiser as his examples (324). Fitzgerald also derived a large share from the continental literary tradition as “Flauberts curious logocentric modernization of the continental adultery novel that allows him to determine the function of romances, books, and magazines in shaping the dreams and desires” (324). The critic remarks that the writing of Gatsby had been obviously influenced by Heart of Darkness written by the English novelist Joseph Conrad. Though Conrads story is a dark tale of the European rape of Africa while Fitzgeralds story tells how the fabulously wealthy and glamorous tycoon is destroyed in his attempts to realize his dream by recapturing his lost and married sweetheart, the problem Fitzgerald focuses on is also “the disastrous moral cost in hypocrisy and destructiveness that civilization at its most opulent and attractive entails” (325). And in order to elicit the truth for the reader, “Fitzgerald borrows Conrads narrative device of adopting the impressionable and corruptive vision of an implicated naïf, Nick Carrayway” (325). As for the valley of the ashes that separates West Egg and New York, the crictic thinks it has a clear imprint of Expressionism that has been already applied into a certain section of the modernistic 1922 novel Ulysses written by Irish novelist James Joyce (325).B.On Murakami and Norwegian Wood1.Wu Yuyu, an associate professor at Soochow, Su Zhou, specializing in Sino-Japanese relations, lay stress on Murakamis various narrative strategies to tell the tale in the research paper “The Harmonious Unity between the Narrative and Aesthetics-On Narrative Strategies in Norwegian Wood”. The paper provides an insightful analysis of the strategies, including “fixed internal focalization” (吴 157), “direct speech” (158) and its variant “epistolary narration” (159), and “non-linear narrative” (160).2.Ki Uchuda is a best-selling writer and literary critic in Japan, virtually a enthusiastic fan of Murakami. In his book of selected critical essays Be Careful of Haruki Murakami there are lots of constructive and original comments on Murakami. For example, Ki thinks it is the “cosmopolitanism” that makes Murakami popular all round the world, “In Murakamis works, the traditional father is always out of the readers sight, so the works become cosmopolitan” (内田 31). Without the “father” means without a “map”, the protagonist is exiled into a strange place, surviving hard and hunting for help from the people he comes across, then “drawing a manual map according to the places he has been in, story is over” (33). The critic addresses that the subject of “describing the existence style of the alive controlled by the dead” (173) guarantees the cosmopolitanism of his works.3.Lin Shaohua, professor from Marine University of China in Qingdao, has undertaken translating Murakamis over thirty kinds of works for almost thirty years, so his analysis and speculation on Murakamis works seem much more reliable and authorative and from his 2004 Haruki Mrakami and His Works we can learn a lot about the novelist and Norwegian Wood.a.Translator Lin sums up four features of the artistry of Murakamis literature as (1) reality that includes imagination, and (2) wording and style, and (3) representation of the atmosphere of times, social environment, and (4) pastoral dreams of adolescence (Lin 31-43).b.In Lins paper “Features of Haruki Murakamis FictionsComparation with Other Japanese Novels”, he concludes that the differences are in four aspects: (1) style (2) imagination (3) feeling of distance and (4) perspective (61-7); while they can be traced to the same origin in aspects of (1) consciousness and interest of the story (2)beautiful and delicate, gentle and restrained and (3) the similar style and wording with Natsume, the well-known novelist lived 100 years ago (68-9).c.In the Appendix , therere three interviews extracts between Murakami and some Japanese journalists. The novelist talks about the development of the style of his writing from aphorism to story then to “commitment” (relationships among people) (208). In another interview on Norwegian Wood, Murakami tells the realism of the story is different and distinct from the novels written by the other writers. Albeit its realistic in many aspects, it has two worlds: the world here and the world there, in which the protagonists two loved girls make lives with their totally different personalities. The rest of the interview tells the readers the fact that the “I” in the novel isnt the writer himself (211-5).d.In Appendix , therere several critical papers researching into Murakamis works of fiction such as “Haruki Murakami: Possibility of American Romance”. The first part focuses on the narrative fluency of Norwegian Wood. The development of the story is “as smooth as rails applied with oil” (94). In the second part, the author gives the definition of “American Romance”, “a literary style exploring the truth of the inner world” (105), and calls Norwegian Wood an “ American Romance that combines realistic novel with allegory” (108) for “Murakamis specific descriptions so lifelike that it seems to base on real situations” (106). Another review reveals the realism in Murakamis eyes, i.e., Murakamis intention of writing, is to “endow the fiction with realistic feeling” (111). The critic concludes that this novel is about “a man who walks back and forth with colossal loneliness and a feeling of alienation” (129). Tragic Comparison between the Two NovelsA.Tragedy of Sensual HedonismHedonism is the mode of the consumer society, the 1920s America. F. Scott Fitzgerald himself had witnessed and taken part in the excesses of the Jazz Age, which can b