1邯郸学院外国语学院School of Foreign Languages of Handan College20 世纪美国文学学期论文论文题目： 了不起的盖茨比中象征主义分析 Title： On the symbolism in The Great Gatsby 专 业： 英语（师范） _ 2On the symbolism in The Great GatsbyAbstract: F. Scott Fitzgerald is a great novelist of the 20th century in American literature. The Great Gatsby is written by him and this novel is one of his best works, which is so important for researchers to study the life of “roaring twenties”. In this novel, Fitzgerald describes the failure of American dream and crisis of values through the different characters life. The author stresses the themes from several aspects, among them; the symbolism is an obvious one. In this novel, the dream, the colors and the name of characters are very vivid, and all of them, have their true meaning. This thesis intends to show a comprehensive analysis of the symbols in The Great Gatsby Key words: symbolism American dream valueIntroduction The Great Gatsby portrays a young mans dream of pursuing of love and wealth, however, after he is successful to reach his aim of money, he is fallen into a series of fantastic accidents. The hero, Gatsby is a poor youth from Midwest, and falls in love with Daisy who is a wealthy girl, but he is too poor to marry her. After the girl married to a rich young man, he decides to make his lost love be back. Gatsby earns enough money to buy a palatial house through some improper means. In order to allure the Buchanans to come, he holds dazzling parties every weekend. However, after they finally come, Gatsby is only to find that the woman is no longer the ideal love of him. His wonderful dream is almost destroyed. At last, Gatsby is shot when Daisy kills a woman in an accident and her husband shifts the blame on him. “Fitzgeralds greatness lies in the fact that he found intuitively, in his personal experience, the embodiment of that of the nation and created a myth out of American life. The story of The Great Gatsby is a good illustration.”(A survey of American Literature. 2008 :217)To sum up, F. Scott Fitzgerald is the great writer who is full of imagination and creation. He skillfully employs plentiful symbolism in this novel to reveal the themes. 1. The symbolic meaning of characters3In American society, the people who lived in the midst of the “roaring twenties” drove fast cars, drank hard, and just took an immense delight it. Fitzgerald describes those peoples life by using various characters. The hero, Gatsby, is a romantic dreamer; he intends to pursue his ideal love, wealth and splendid life. It is actually a mirror of the whole American life. Gatsbys life follows a clear pattern: there is, at first, dream, then disenchantment, and finally a sense of failure and despair. So, Gatsbys personal experience approximates the whole American experience up to the first few decades of the twentieth century. Daisy is a shadow of American woman. At the beginning, For Gatsby, Daisy is a total perfect woman, who represents noble, wealth, grace and all of beautiful things. A creature of whiteness indeed, Daisy is the fairy girl of Gatsbys dreams in more ways than one-and her essential lack of emotion provides an important link in the chain of perverted Ideal, pathetically futile gestures, and sordid circumstances that finally destroy Gatsby and his dream. Daisy, in short, is in love less with Jay Gatsby the man, than with Jay Gatsby the Knight Errant. Some comments say that she loves the gesture which Gatsby has made, the romance of unrequited love and noble devotion. This attitude, of course, is a basic irony of the book. ( Stanley Cooperman. 1996 :44 ) 2. Symbolic theme of American dreamThe American dream is based on the ideology that each one can be successful through his own efforts and cultivating his qualities. Lots of American has realized their dreams by lots of methods. Frankly speaking, American dream relates to an aspiration for spiritual and material improvement, especially the pursuit of material. This dream, after all, is one of the most glowing visions of civilized man -a vision of a New World, of unbound opportunities, of a potential Garden of Eden whose lack of limitations staggered the imagination. ( Stanley Cooperman. 1996 :42 ) From Gatsby adolescence, in short, he has been pursuing the Holy Glow of some vaguely imagined Succes an identity gleaming like a mirage just over the horizon of tomorrow. The result is both complete romanticism and complete lack of any real identity at all. In this society, Gatsby is destined to be isolated helpless and to fail in all. Obviously, Gatsby is one of typical representatives of American Dream that all generations of American people pursued. Although Gatsby struggle for his dream, he almost can not get into the upper class entirely. Whats more, Gatsbys smile is another symbol of the vacuum beneath the surface of his appearance. Representing 4not a st