英文论文《了不起的盖茨比》的原型研究(4)
When Nick, Jordan, and Tom drive through the valley of ashes, however, they discover that Gatsby’s car has struck and killed Myrtle, Tom’s lover. They rush back to Long Island, where Nick learns from Gatsby that Daisy was driving the car when it struck Myrtle, but that Gatsby intends to take the blame. The next day, Tom tells Myrtle’s husband, George, that Gatsby was the driver of the car. George, who has leapt to the conclusion that the driver of the car that killed Myrtle must have been her lover, finds Gatsby in the pool at his mansion and shoots him dead. He then fatally shoots himself. Nick stages a small funeral for Gatsby, ends his relationship with Jordan, and moves back to the Midwest to escape the disgust he feels for the people surrounding Gatsby’s life and for the emptiness and moral decay of life among the wealthy on the East Coast.
Nick reflects that just as Gatsby’s dream of Daisy was corrupted by money and dishonesty, the American dream of happiness and inpidualism has disintegrated into the mere pursuit of wealth. Though Gatsby’s power to transform his dreams into reality is what makes him “great”, Nick reflects that the era of dreaming—both Gatsby’s dream and the American dream—is over.
3 The Archetypal Analysis of the Main Characters
The purpose of the archetypal criticism is to find the underlying correspondence or analogues in words through the text in order to apprehend the recurrences of certain archetypal themes, figures, images and narrative patterns. Hence, the power and significance of works of literature, or of the whole of the literature is explained.
3.1 A Critical Perspective on Archetypal Criticism
Archetypal Criticism, in its early time, is called myth-criticism, and the definition is the origin of literature from religious phenomen, such as rituals, myths and totems. Archetypal criticism means interprets a text by focusing on repeated myths and archetypal in the themes, symbols, images, and characters in a literary work. Archetypal criticism suggests that archetypes dominate the form and function of literary work.
The definition of archetype is different from different scholars. The word archetype originates from Ancient Greek. Ache means root and origin and type means pattern or model, because archetypes usually include myths(tales, rituals, totems, taboo, etc.), so archetypal criticism is often used for myth .
Archetypal criticism is very popular in the 1950s and 1960s, mostly due to the work of literary critic Wilson Edmund. In Wilson’s study, he analyzes the inter-connection among the mythical elements and tries to uncover and categorize the basic myths and archetypal of world literary works. Wilson believes that the major concern of archetypal criticism is not only to discover the archetypal structure hidden behind the narration and the surface images, but also to reveal the archetypal patterns connecting one work to another to unify and integrate the literary experience. Wilson thinks that the repetition of certain common images is not just a coincidence but a certain unit in the nature and in the communicating activity.
Archetype could be “a literal symbol, or a cluster of symbols, which are used recurrently throughout literature, and thereby become conventional”. Thus, archetypes, which makes the different and isolate parts into a whole unit, show us the power of literary tradition. Archetype occurs in different forms as image, theme, character and setting in different literary genres at different times. In 1982, Wilson gives his new definition of archetype, with the basic viewpoint remaining the same, “one of the first things I noticed about literature was the stability of its structural units, the fact that certain themes, situations, and characters types, in comedy let us say, have persisted with very little change from Aristotle to our own time. I have used the term ‘archetype’ to describe these building blocks”. Wilson appraises the important influence of the Bible in the imaginative tradition of Western literature. The plots, characters, theme, and symbols in the Bible have appeared in so many literary works that without a doubt these become literary archetypes.
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