Analysis Of The Great Gatsby In The Light Of Appraisal Theory

Francis Scott Fitzgerald, one of the greatest giants among modern American novelists, is honored as the spokesman of the Jazz Age, an outstanding "chronicler", and a most representative author of "the Lost Generation". The Great Gatsby is his third novel and also the most representative one which reflects the prosperity of economy, the moral absence and the declination of the American Dream of the Jazz Age (1920s).Appraisal theory is developed from the research of the interpersonal meaning of the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). There are three sub-systems:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Attitude is concerned with our feelings, including Affect, Judgment and Appreciation. Engagement deals with sourcing attitudes and the play of the voices around opinions in discourse. Graduation attends to grading phenomena whereby feelings are amplified and categories blurred.This paper takes the Chapter7of the Great Gatsby as the corpus and employs the System-Coder to conduct the quantitive analysis. The results show that there are altogether1763Appraisal resources in Chapter7. Among them, Attitude, Engagement and Graduation account for33.4%,24.0%and42.6%respectively.Through the research, we find:(1) There are many Appraisal resources in Chapter7of the Great Gatsby.(2) The employment of Attitude and Graduation resources are much more than the usage of Engagement resources.(3) The amount of Appraisal resources, the positive or negative Attitude, the Contraction or the Expansion and the raise or the lower of the Graduation can reflect the degree of the speaker’s attitude and reveal the characters’ mental conditions and psychological features. The choice of Appraisal expressions can facilitate the characters to express their feelings and assessments, which are in rurn manifested in their choices of the evaluative items in their utterances. Therefore, the characters’ temperaments are manifested by the employment of the Appraisal resources.According to the analysis of the Appraisal resources in the novel, we can find the personalities of the characters and the change of their complicated relations, which aims to explore a new perspective to analyze the literary works.