ミスマッチ、夢の崩壊、そして秩序への退行 : The Great Gatsbyの一考察(特別寄稿論文,関西英文学研究)

抄録

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's tour de force, is an endless array of "mismatches." They are extensively seen in Gatsby's taste and behavior, including his courtship of Daisy. Even his own name is a "mismatch," meaning a WASP gangster armed with a pistol. Moreover, the milieu for Gatsby's out-of-date quest is New York in the 1920s, an appalling "mismatch" of material prosperity and spiritual dilapidation. These "mismatches" are sometimes comical, and yet ominous enough to prefigure the approaching catastrophe. In addition, practically all the characters except Nick are mentally contaminated more or less by omnipotent money. The end of Gatsby's dream illustrates that the American Dream of success has vanished as in the money-oriented society the great class difference has now become insurmountable. Nick's story of "mismatches" and the moral depravity in the East ends up with an unnatural sense of hope-with his external message that we "beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." The appeal, however, sounds somehow weak, because it is made by Nick who, instead of staying on in the East, has severed all his relation to the East, and chosen a kind of regression to his native Mid-west. It seems that the restoration of moral order in America was so difficult that he had to turn his back totally on its corrupt realities. However, does it not mean a defeat, rather than a hope, on Nick's part? Actually, Nick's resolution and appeal make a contradiction. This double-mindedness forms the real theme of The Great Gatsby, pointing up Fitzgerald's own awareness, acquired through his affairs with Ginevra and Zelda, of the depraving yet irresistible power of money.