The Characterization Of Daisy In The Great Gatsby

The novel of The Great Gatsby, written by American writer Frances Scott Fitzgerald, is regarded as the symbol of Jazz Age in American literature. It takes place in the 1920s in Long Island and New York City of America. The writer sketches the social and life phenomena in Jazz Age by means of beautiful and skilled words, penetrates the prevailing social problems and human indifference with a sharp and objective observation and depicts the demise of the American dream. The novel is narrated by Nick, a character in the story who is the neighbor of Gatsby. The setting of many plots, scenes, and the modeling of characters in The Great Gatsby has been blended with a great of life experiences of the writer himself. Within all the characters, the role of the young pretty lady Daisy has been constantly concerned and disputed form different viewpoints of scholars, such as symbolism, feminism, archetype interpretation and so forth.This paper is an analysis of Daisy's discourse from the perspective of interpersonal metafunction, which is one of the three matafunctions in the systemic-functional grammar. The interpersonal metafunction reflects the interaction between the addresser and addressee by their discourse. Meanwhile, it implies the addresser's status, attitude, motivation, participation in social activities, and establishment of social relationships with others, etc. In people's discourse, interpersonal metafunction is embodied by mood system and modality. Under the guidance of Thompson's analysis pattern, the writer of this paper summarized, classified and compared all the marks of mood system and modality in Daisy's discourse in The Great Gatsby, by doing so the characterization of Daisy and her relationships with other characters can be brought into focus. Meanwhile, the discourse of Daisy is stated by the first personal narrator Nick in this novel. To some extent, Nick's comments on Daisy's discourse also reflects the writer's attitude and comments towards Daisy. Therefore, by investigating Nick's description and comments on Daisy, the writer's motivation of characterize Daisy can be revealed. The mood system and modality in Daisy's discourse reflects the duality in her personality. By modeling Daisy, the writer expressed his dual emotion towards women like Daisy—love yet hate, which is also his emotion towards the society and the age.Analyzing the interpersonal metafunction of the addresser's discourse is one aspect of the application of functional grammar to stylistic analysis. It is an attempt of interpreting the text by means of linguistics. The goal of this paper, by revealing the characterization of Daisy, is to provide a new perspective of interpreting and explaining literary works.