On Houses In Fitzgerald's Novel

Houses in Fitzgerald's novels are with rich contents and yet have been rarely studi ed.Houses in his novels involve two opposite values,and what is behind is the choi ce by Fitzgerald.First and foremost,houses are worldly things — they consist of m aterials,and they consist of wealth.Among all the houses in his life and his novels,there are three important houses that involve his own life experiences: the house w here he lived with parents in S?o Paulo during his childhood,the Princeton spire in his youth,and the apartment in Bernie during his adulthood.These three houses ar e important representatives of his emotional attachments,and,what he has discove red,is an eternal value in the non-eternal interaction with these houses — an etern al value that he obtained under the power of religious imagination,a spiritual “trans cendental moment” that inspired the his creative impulse and his pursuit for the futu re.This eternal value also gave birth to a golden worldview in his novel,a worldvie w with a hope for the future and with a meaning of life.Under this worldview,the fut ure is golden,the future is of countless possibilities,and the future is where myths and dreams are about.Second,as a writer who pursues the artistry,Fitzgerald is not satisfied with the houses merely being worldly things(i.e.material,wealth,and emotional attachment s),so he goes further — with houses,he discovered the image of death and the lan dscape of an “entropy” world(the universe is deemed to go totally disordered).Eith er as an image of death or an image of "entropy",houses reveal the shortness of or dered life,and also reflects another thought tendency of Fitzgerald: the downward t rend is unstoppable,order and harmony will finally give way to disorder and chaos,and at the end of the world,instead,is “nothingness”.The world development will n ever be shifted by human wills,but instead,all human wills will be raptured by the f orce of nature.The broken,crippled,and burned houses described in the novel are just symbols of the human wills.Countless possibilities for the future are eliminated,and golden future is actually grey future,with “grey and piled houses”.This is oppo sed to the “golden future” mentioned above.The above two opposite world views constitute a duality in Fitzgerald's novels.The two opposite tendencies have seriously different attitudes towards future,nam ely,yearning for the future and fear of the future.And these two opposite world vie ws sometimes do not separately exist in his writing,but are mixed in the same expr ession of the house;further,they are externalized into two specific forms: time of th e house,and directions of the house.The extreme form of the future houses and th e directions east and north correspond to the grey future and the “entropy” world in Fitzgerald's imagination,while the extreme form of past houses and the directions west and south correspond to the golden future in Fitzgerald's imagination.Two ch aracters in his novels,Nick in "The Great Gatsby”,and Sally in " Ice Palace”,who ini tially flee from the west and south and yearn for the east and north,represent Fitzgerald's confusion and wandering toward two kinds of future;but the final destination of Nick and Sally,who return to West and South,represents Fitzgerald's final choic e: instead of recognizing the golden future,he escapes from it;instead of pursuing t he golden future,he retreats to the past.