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牛津英文经典（Oxford
Worlds Classics）为牛津大学出版社百年积淀的精品书系，译林出版社原版引进。除牛津品牌保证的权威原著版本之外，每册书附含名家导读、作家简介及年表、词汇解析、文本注释、背景知识拓展、同步阅读导引、版本信息等，特别适合作为大学生和学有余力的中学生英语学习的必读材料。导读者包括牛津和剑桥大学的资深教授和知名学者。整套书选目精良，便携易读，实为亲近*名著的经典读本。
《了不起的盖茨比》是菲茨杰拉德的代表作品，世界文学史上的经典作品之一，《纽约时报》称其为20世纪美国小说的经典之作，美国现代图书馆委员会讲其评为20世纪美国小说佳作*名，20世纪英语小说佳作第二名。自1925年出版以来，它成为了美国天才编辑麦克斯韦尔珀金斯所在出版社斯科里伯纳的*畅销图书，同时不断被改编为戏剧和电影。这本书不仅俘获了世界各国的每一代读者，也影响了众多作家，如J.D.塞林格、村上春树等。牛津英文经典的版本增加了详尽注释、拓展阅读书目，以及菲茨杰拉德研究领域的卓越学者Ruth
Prigozy撰写的精彩导读，便于深读文本。
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1922年夏天，耶鲁大学毕业生、第一次世界大战退伍军人尼克在长岛的富人区租住了一间小公寓。他的邻居、神秘的富豪杰盖茨比，总是举行奢华的宴会，却从不露面。某一天，尼克接到了宴会邀请，从此卷入了盖茨比的悲剧命运，最终让他对美国东岸的梦幻生活失去了好感。
《了不起的盖茨比》被视为菲茨杰拉德的杰作，全面刻画了爵士时代和喧嚣的1920年代的社会图景，涵盖的主题包括堕落、理想主义，以及对变动、社会动荡和挥霍生活的抵制，被视为一个惊醒了美国梦的故事。
The
story primarily concerns the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his
quixotic passion and obsession for the beautiful former debutante Daisy
Buchanan.
Considered
to be Fitzgeralds magnum opus, The Great
Gatsby explores themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, social
upheaval, and excess, creating a portrait of the Jazz Age or the Roaring
Twenties that has been described as a cautionary tale regarding the American
Dream.
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| 關於作者： |
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F.S.菲茨杰拉德，美国20世纪杰出小说家，1896年9月24日生于美国明尼苏达州圣保罗市，毕业于普林斯顿大学，1920年出版首部作品《人间天堂》，深受读者和评论界好评。四十四年的人生中，他创作了4部长篇以及150部短篇小说，代表作品包括《了不起的盖茨比》《夜色温柔》《人间天堂》等，被誉为迷惘的一代和爵士时代的代言人。
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| 目錄：
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Introduction
Note
on the Text
Select
Bibliography
A
Chronology of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Map
of Manhattan to Long Island
THE
GREAT GATSBY
Explanatory
Notes
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Oxford Worlds Classics
For over 100 years Oxford Worlds
Classics have brought readers closer to the worlds great literature. Now with
over 700 titlesfrom the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth
centurys greatest novelsthe series makes available lesser-known as well as
celebrated writing.
The pocket-sized hardbacks of the
early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham
Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading.
Today the series is recognized for
its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama
and poetry, religion, philosophy, and politics. Each edition includes
perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the
changing needs of readers.
Once
Again
To
ZELDA
CHAPTER
I
In
my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that Ive
been turning over in my mind ever since.
Whenever
you feel like criticising any one, he told me, just remember that all the
people in this world havent had the advantages that youve had.
He
didnt say any more, but weve always been unusually communicative in a
reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In
consequence, Im inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up
many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran
bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality
when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was
unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret
griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the con?dences were unsoughtfrequently I
have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some
unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for
the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they
express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.
Reserving judgments is a matter of in?nite hope. I am still a little afraid of
missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I
snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out
unequally at birth.
And,
after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a
limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a
certain point I dont care what its founded on. When I came back from the East
last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of
moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged
glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this
book, was exempt from my reactionGatsby, who represented everything for which
I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful
gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened
sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those
intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This
responsiveness had nothing to do with that ?abby impressionability which is
digni?ed under the name of the creative temperamentit was an extraordinary
gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other
person and which it is not likely I shall ever ?nd again. NoGatsby turned out
all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust ?oated in the
wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive
sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
My
family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for
three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a
tradition that were descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual
founder of my line was my grandfathers brother, who came here in ?fty-one,
sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business
that my father carries on to-day.
I
never saw this great-uncle, but Im supposed to look like himwith special
reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in fathers of?ce. I
graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father,
and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as
the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back
restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now
seemed like the ragged edge of the universeso I decided to go East and learn
the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it
could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if
they were choosing a prep school for me, and ?nally said, Why ye-es, with
very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to ?nance me for a year, and after
various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of
twenty-two.
The
practical thing was to ?nd rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I
had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man
at the of?ce suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it
sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard
bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the ?rm ordered him to
Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dogat least I had him
for a few days until he ran awayand an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made
my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the
electric stove.
It
was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived
than I, stopped me on the road.
How
do you get to West Egg* village? he asked helplessly.
I
told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a
path?nder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of
the neighborhood. And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves
growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar
conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
There
was so much to read, for one thing, and so much ?ne health to be pulled down
out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and
credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold
like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only
Midas and Morgan and Mcenas* knew. And I had the high intention of reading
many other books besides. I was rather literary in collegeone year I wrote a
series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale Newsand now I was
going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most
limited of all specialists, the well-rounded man. This isnt just an
epigramlife is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after
all.
It
was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the
strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island
which extends itself due east of New Yorkand where there are, among other
natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city
a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy
bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western
hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovalslike
the egg in the Columbus story,* they are both crushed ?at at the contact
endbut their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual wonder to the
gulls that ?y overhead. To the wingless a more interesting phenomenon is their
dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.
I
lived at West Egg, thewell, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a
most super?cial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast
between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only ?fty yards from the
Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or ?fteen
thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standardit
was a factual imitation of some Htel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one
side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool,
and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsbys mansion. Or,
rather, as I didnt know Mr Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman
of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it
had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my
neighbors lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionairesall for eighty
dollars a month.
Across
the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the
water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over
there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once
removed, and Id known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days
with them in Chicago.
Her
husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most
powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven*a national ?gure in a
way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one
that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously
wealthyeven in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproachbut
now hed left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath
away： for instance, hed brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake
Forest.* It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy
enough to do that.
Why
they came East I dont know. They had spent a year in France for no particular
reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo
and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the
telephone, but I didnt believe itI had no sight into Daisys heart, but I
felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the
dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.
And
so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two
old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate
than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion,
overlooking the bay.
The
lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a
mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens?nally when it
reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the
momentum of its run.
The
front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with re?ected gold
and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was
standing with his legs apart on the front porch.
He
had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of
thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant
eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of
always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his
riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that bodyhe seemed to ?ll
those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a
great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It
was a body capable of enormous leveragea cruel body.
His
speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness
he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people
he likedand there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.
Now,
dont think my opinion on these matters is ?nal, he seemed to say, just
because Im stronger and more of a man than you are. We were in the same
senior society,* and while we were never intimate I always had the impression
that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, de?ant
wistfulness of his own.
We
talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.
Ive
got a nice place here, he said, his eyes ?ashing about restlessly.
Turning
me around by one arm, he moved a broad ?at hand along the front vista,
including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep, pungent
roses, and a snub-nosed motorboat that bumped the tide offshore.
It
belonged to Demaine, the oil man. He turned me around again, politely and
abruptly. Well go inside.
We
walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound
into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and
gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way
into the house.
A
breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other
like pale ?ags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the
ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as
wind does on the sea.
The
only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which
two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were
both in white, and their dresses were rippling and ?uttering as if they had
just been blown back in after a short ?ight around the house. I must have stood
for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan
of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear
windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the
rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the ?oor.
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