On The Night Images In The Novels Of F.S.fitzgerald

Fitzgerald’s works reflected the money-oriented,hedonistic and corrupt American society in the first half of the century.In order to truly reproduce the disillusioned and confused mental state of the young generation after the war,Fitzgerald incorporated many images into his novels,building a dense and exquisite imagery system,of which night imagery is an important part.The night imagery in Fitzgerald’s novels is divided into three different types: red night,white night,and dark night,which provide a broad and rich spatial and temporal background for the story.The red night is filled with the glamour and bustle of the money city,a hedonistic place for people to drink and revel in the jazz age;the white night is quiet and peaceful,witnessing the growth of family,friendship and love of the protagonists,showing people’s ordinary and warm daily life after returning to tranquility;the dark night is chaotic and depressing,with people struggling in the thickening dark panic and eerie dreams,experiencing the death of friends and relatives,the end of love and the collapse of faith one after another,facing the tragic end of fate.The night imagery is rich in metaphorical meaning and contains Fitzgerald’s thoughts on the fate of the underclass and America.The red night is a profile of the psychological state of the social groups in the Jazz Age,suggesting that the American people after World War I fell into a crisis of faith under the influence of hedonism and moral degradation and spiritual confusion;the white night is the author’s ideal picture of a beautiful life in which material and spiritual civilization coexist,in which the individual lives in poetic dwelling,ideal redemption and reflection on fate;the dark night symbolizes the inevitable tragic theme of the Jazz Age.The fierce conflict between ideals and reality,between human beings and things,suppresses the freedom of human nature,and the high pressure of materialism reduces American society to a spiritual wasteland.The three sets of imagery together depict the complete picture of the nocturnal world of the Jazz Age: the red night is intoxicating,the white night is pure,and the dark night is heavy.In summary,the night imagery expresses Fitzgerald’s rational examination of the radical changes in American society and reveals his despairing pity for the futility of life in the development of modern civilization.At the same time,night imagery also presents a unique aesthetic sense of magnificence and decadence in content and form.This aesthetic bias has made Fitzgerald’s novels highly artistic and has had a profound influence on the development of modern American literature and even world literature.