| Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby are two excellent novels in the early twentieth century, and both of the novels are set dream-seeking as their theme. The two novels not only share the similar theme but also share similar narrative techniques. In other words, The Great Gatsby imitates Heart of Darkness from these two aspects. About Fitzgerald’s indebtedness to Conrad’s works, many literary critics and scholars have been studied and proved it in the last decades; moreover, Fitzgerald even once admitted his imitation towards Conrad’s novels. In this thesis, by comparing the two novels from the prospective of narrative theme and narrative techniques, I found that in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald imitated these two aspects from Heart of Darkness. From the aspect of narrative theme, Fitzgerald imitates the theme of Heart of Darkness, a failure of dream-seeking adventure, and he also sets the same theme in The Great Gatsby. Meanwhile, Fitzgerald also imitates Conrad’s writing skills to deepen the theme. From the aspect of narrative techniques, Fitzgerald imitates "I as witness" and integrity analepses in Conrad’s novel, and uses them in his own work. However, Fitzgerald did not imitate the whole aspects of Heat of Darkness, instead of that he tried to exceed the level of imitation. Here I summarize these exceeding parts into the following five aspects. Firstly, different from Kurtz’s personal tragedy, Gatsby’s tragedy is a social tragedy; secondly, there is clear description about a new theme of confrontation between the new and traditional nobles in The Great Gatsby, but there is no clear description about it in Heart of Darkness; thirdly, Nick’s narration is more reliable than Marlow’s narration; fourthly, the narration in Heart of Darkness is more like a linear narration with some features of traditional oral narration, but the narration of The Great Gatsby is less linear with features of modern novels, such as stream of consciousness narration and more narrators narration; finally, Fitzgerald gave symbolic meaning for Daisy who is the goal in Gatsby’s dream-seeking adventure, but Conrad did not attach any other symbolic meaning for Kurtz’s goal in Heart of Darkness.This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter is introduction which includes a brief introduction about the two authors and their works, literature review, and the significance and purposes of this thesis; the second chapter compares narrative themes between the Heart of Darkness and The Great Gatsby by using theories from narratotology, such as iterative narrative, Bremond’s basic sequence of narrative and the relationship between story space and discourse space. I found many evidences to prove Fitzgerald’s imitation from Conrad in narrative theme; the third chapter compares narrative techniques between the two novels, which I found out that Fitzgerald also imitates narrative techniques from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, such as, first person narration and integrity analepses; in the fourth chapter, I found out some breakthroughs of The Great Gatsby by comparing and analyzing the two novels; and the last chapter is the conclusion part.By comparing Heart of Darkness and The Great Gatsby, and I found out many evidences to prove that Fitzgerald imitates Heart of Darkness in some extent, but Fitzgerald does not stop on the level of imitation. He not only internalizes techniques of Conrad’s work, but also combines these techniques with American native culture and uses them in his own novel. In this way, Fitzgerald builds up his own writing style and makes his works last for several centuries. |
