Carnival Spirit in the Great Gatsby

Lixiao HAN

Tianjin University of Technology, Tianjin, 300384, CHINA

Abstract: F. Scott Fitzgerald, who has been regarded as “the angel of the Jazz Age”, has written 5 novels and 178 short stories in his short but legendary life. Most of his works are tangled with the empty and luxurious life of America in 1920s, among which The Great Gatsby is his masterpiece. As soon as it was published, this novel had been revised and taken into screen ｏｒ stage for several times. As a hot subject of critics, it has been studied from various points of view, such as structure, writing skill, way of narration, theme and so on. This thesis attempts to analyze the carnival spirit in The Great Gatsby with Bakhtin’s theory of carnivalesque.

Keywords: Carnival Spirit; Bakhtin’s Theory; The Great Gatsby