《偉大的蓋茨比》與《挪威的森林》比較研究

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1、 《偉大的蓋茨比》與《挪威的森林》比較研究 A Comparative Study between The Great Gatsby and Norwegian Wood Abstract: 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

2、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 Murakami’s m

3、ost 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：《偉大的蓋茨比》是美國(guó)二十世紀(jì)初期偉大的小說(shuō)家斯科特?菲茨杰拉德的

4、代表作，描述了一個(gè)二戰(zhàn)退伍軍人的金錢(qián)夢(mèng)和想要重溫的舊夢(mèng)是怎樣隨著“美國(guó)夢(mèng)”的破滅而破滅的。村上春樹(shù)是日本當(dāng)代聲名顯著的小說(shuō)家，他的代表作《挪威的森林》是一部充滿了青春傷逝和疏離感甚至可怕的死亡傾向的愛(ài)情小說(shuō)。菲茨杰拉德是村上春樹(shù)最為崇拜的美國(guó)作家之一，他們的這兩部小說(shuō)在悲劇意識(shí)上明顯地相似。 關(guān)鍵詞：悲劇對(duì)比; 享樂(lè)主義; 代溝; 升華; 幻滅 Contents Ⅰ. Introduction …………………………..................................……….1 Ⅱ. Literature

5、 Reviews…..…………………………………......…….…1 A. On Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby………………………...…..…….2 B. On Murakami and Norwegian Wood………………….…….…………4 Ⅲ. Tragic Comparison between the Two Novels………………..…...6 A. Tragedy of Sensual Hedonism.……………………….…………..…...6 B. Tragedy of Generation Gap, Focusing on

6、the Son-Parent Relationship ….8 C. Sublimation and Disillusionment of the Tragic Deaths…..……….…10 1. Death Leads to Disillusionment……………………………..…..…10 2. Tragedy Can Be Sublimated……………………………..…..…11 Ⅳ. Conclusion………………………………..……...............................12 Works Cited…………………...............

7、.............……………...……..13 A Comparative Study between The Great Gatsby and Norwegian Wood Ⅰ. 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,

8、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”

9、 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’ bests

10、eller. 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 deca

11、de of the 1920s. The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s 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 o

12、rigins, one can attain wealth and social standing in the U.S. through talent and individual initiative. Ⅱ. Literature Reviews Though F. Scott Fitzgerald and Haruki Murakami aren’t contemporary with each other or from the same cultural backgrounds, Murakami’s motherland Japan virtually had

13、been once under the United States’ supervision for several decades after the Second World War during which Uncle Sam’s culture had influenced Japan greatly in many aspects. As for Murakami, born under the occupation and grew up with the incessant prospering country which hasn’t stopped her admiratio

14、n 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 Murakami’s certain novel and some American novelist’s

15、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 Gatsby 1. A paper written by W

16、ang 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 Fitzgerald’s four completed novels. The author defines The Great Gatsby as “deepening tragedy” (王

17、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 Fitzgerald’s novels, and the tragedy of Gatsby comes after his childish fancy and fantasy for l

18、ife 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 semiologi

19、st 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 West

20、ern 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 context–so as to free the text from the so-called determinism of society or psychology and trans

21、fer 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 fro

22、m Literature College of Normal University of Tianjin, applies the “l(fā)iterature theory of structuralism” (黃 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 ‘losin

23、g’ ” (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

24、thinks it is of no significance to “equate the narrator with the writer coercively” (孫 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

25、 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” (鄭 424), as “Nick directly tells the story and determines the structure of it---the tale becomes confusing and intriguing because

26、 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 s

27、ame time, and still retain the ability to function” (425). 5. “Fitzgerald may be called a stereotype who is against the rationalism” (陳 31). In the end, the commentator concludes The Great Gatsby is “the contradictions between rationalism and irrationalism” and “reprimands on the obliteration of hu

28、man’s 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” w

29、ritten 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 t

30、rue 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

31、 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 Dr

32、eiser as his examples (324). Fitzgerald also derived a large share from the continental literary tradition as “Flaubert’s 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”

33、 (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 Conrad’s story is a dark tale of the European rape of Africa while Fitzgerald’s story tells how the fabulously wealthy and glamorous tycoon i

34、s 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

35、 for the reader, “Fitzgerald borrows Conrad’s narrative device of adopting the impressionable and corruptive vision of an implicated naf, 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 be

36、en already applied into a certain section of the modernistic 1922 novel Ulysses written by Irish novelist James Joyce (325). B. On Murakami and Norwegian Wood 1. Wu Yuyu, an associate professor at Soochow, Su Zhou, specializing in Sino-Japanese relations, lay stress on Murakami’s various narrati

37、ve 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” (吳 157), “direct speech” (158) and its va

38、riant “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 comme

39、nts on Murakami. For example, Ki thinks it is the “cosmopolitanism” that makes Murakami popular all round the world, “In Murakami’s works, the traditional ‘father’ is always out of the reader’s sight, so the works become cosmopolitan” (內(nèi)田 31). Without the “father” means without a “map”, the protagon

40、ist 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 d

41、ead” (173) guarantees the cosmopolitanism of his works. 3. Lin Shaohua, professor from Marine University of China in Qingdao, has undertaken translating Murakami’s over thirty kinds of works for almost thirty years, so his analysis and speculation on Murakami’s works seem much more reliable and aut

42、horative 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 Murakami’s literature as (1) reality that includes imagination, and (2) wording and style, and (3) representation of the atmos

43、phere of times, social environment, and (4) pastoral dreams of adolescence (Lin 31-43). b. In Lin’s paper “Features of Haruki Murakami’s Fictions—Comparation with Other Japanese Novels”, he concludes that the differences are in four aspects: (1) style (2) imagination (3) feeling of distance and (4)

44、 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 Ⅰ, t

45、here’re 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 o

46、f the story is different and distinct from the novels written by the other writers. Albeit it’s realistic in many aspects, it has two worlds: the world here and the world there, in which the protagonist’s two loved girls make lives with their totally different personalities. The rest of the intervie

47、w tells the readers the fact that the “I” in the novel isn’t the writer himself (211-5). d. In Appendix Ⅲ, there’re several critical papers researching into Murakami’s works of fiction such as “Haruki Murakami: Possibility of American Romance”. The first part focuses on the narrative fluency of Nor

48、wegian 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 realisti

49、c novel with allegory” (108) for “Murakami’s specific descriptions so lifelike that it seems to base on real situations” (106). Another review reveals the realism in Murakami’s eyes, i.e., Murakami’s intention of writing, is to “endow the fiction with realistic feeling” (111). The critic concludes t

50、hat this novel is about “a man who walks back and forth with colossal loneliness and a feeling of alienation” (129). Ⅲ. Tragic Comparison between the Two Novels A. Tragedy of Sensual Hedonism Hedonism is the mode of the consumer society, the 1920’s America. F. Scott Fitzgerald himself had wit

51、nessed and taken part in the excesses of the Jazz Age, which can be traced in his masterpiece The Great Gatsby. Sexual hedonism especially leads to the tragedy of the protagonist Gatsby whose life itself is abstemious and careful in terms of smoking and drinking, etc. Nevertheless, his lifelong admi

52、ration and adoration for his angel Daisy begins with undesirable and disgraceful action of him. “He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously-eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand” (Fitzgerald 124). This lust for momenta

53、ry joyance reflects Gatsby’s disgraceful mind-set, which seems like he wants to “cook the rice prematurely”. It’s this discreet and irresponsible action leads to the tragedy of the “great” Gatsby. If the young Gatsby and Daisy’s sensual attraction can be treated as the general impulse of the youth,

54、 the adultery between Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan, and George Wilson’s wife Myrtle is undoubtedly out of their first meeting, we can see Tom is just attracted by Myrtle’s sensuous surplus flesh, perceptible vitality, and her smoldering nerves of the body; and as Myrtle herself told, “when we came

55、into the station he was next to me and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm” (30). The sensual hedonist Tom Buchanan immediately causes the destruction of his mistress. As for Norwegian Wood, nobody, if you have read it, cannot fail to be astonished by the considerable description of sexual

56、 action between people having various relationships such as friends, strangers and so on. The deaths of the two young lovers, Kizuki and Naoko, are undeniably the most tragic events in the whole nostalgic story of loss and sexuality. Kizuki, the protagonist and narrator Toru Watanabe’s best and only

57、 friend in high school and Naoko’s boyfriend, took his own life at his 17; Naoko herself, two years after his death and a few months before her committing suicide, had given the reason for their tragedy exactly. “We had almost no oppressiveness of sea of the anguish that comes with the sudden swe

58、lling of the ego that ordinary kids experience when they reach puberty. We were totally open about sex, and where our egos were concerned, the way we absorbed and shared each other’s, we had no strong awareness of them.” … “‘Because we would have had to pay the world back what we owed it’, she said,

59、 raising her eyes to mine. ‘The pain of growing up. We didn’t pay when we should have, so now the bills are due’.” (村上 168-9). The young lovers’ behavior can be seen as the pubertal version of sensual hedonism, which makes them lose their egos and “kids who grew up naked on a desert island”, so t

60、hey lost the ability to get into the larger social reality, “the outside world” (169). Although Naoko has thought and told Toru, “The dead will be always dead, but we have to go on living” (147), meanwhile Toru is called “the link” (169) connecting the young lovers with the outside; Toru, under the

61、influence of the representative of established rich Nagasama (just as Tom in The Great Gatsby), given to debauchery, goes along with Nagasama to have intercourse with random girls Nagasama picks up, which makes Naoko know it well that in the context of consumer society Toru can’t live happily withou

62、t marrying a normal girl. So, at last the sensual hedonism under the social context ousts Naoko thoroughly from the world. Another remarkable victim of sensual hedonism is Nagasama’s long-suffering girlfriend Hatsumi. Although she looks on herself as a “stupid, old-fashioned girl” (281), she has n

63、ever really been angry with Nagasama’s sleeping around. Nevertheless, at the dinner celebrating Nagasama’s passing the Foreign Ministry exam, Hatsumi makes her voice heard, “I get hurt” (270) for his sleeping around and asking angrily, “Why am I not enough” (270). During the whole dinner, Nagasama g

64、ets nasty against Hatsumi, from the story of his “old man” father frequently bringing mistress to the same restaurant to the girl-swapping between he and Toru, he defines his hunger for sex as something he can’t live without and plays with the “mutual understanding between people” which makes Hatsum

65、i shout at him. Four years later, Hatsumi takes her own life by slashing the wrists. From the above analysis and quotations we can conclude that both the novels reveal the horrible effects of sensual hedonism. Adultery and purposeless sexual action can both lead to destruction. B. Tragedy of G

66、eneration Gap, Focusing on the Son-Parent Relationship There is a tragic style that is familiar to many Chinese in terms of generation gap, which can be well related through the proverb “The trees wanting stillness complain about the ceaseless wind, the people wanting to do their filial duties lament being too late.” As adolescents, we kiss the childhood along with the intimacy to our parent goodbye and gradually get accustomed with staying alone or spending more time with friends or thinking