Dick, a young and promising doctor, is studying principle of mental disease In Swiss. A daughter of a millionaire suffers from mental disease and is sent to the hospital. Nick marries her out of sympathy in order to cure her. He devotes himself to looking after her. She recovers gradually, but both of them get a lover and later get divorced. Feeling depressed, Nick gets indulged in drinking. He returns to America, and works as a doctor in a town, and achieves nothing all his life. It reveals his frustration with his own life. He was made to write for money to support the family, and used up his potential very early.
The Great Gatsby (了不起的盖茨比)p288
It’s like an autobiography
Daisy: beautiful, but mean, selfish, vulgar, snobbish, completely dehumanized and dehumanizing people for whom nothing is held sacred except themselves. Indulged in pleasure-seeking. What she cares about is how to kill time, what to do this afternoon, tomorrow afternoon, afternoon of the following 20 years. Money-oriented. Her voice is “full of money”－ like the sound of coins.
Gatsby: charmingly innocent enough to believe that the past can be recovered and resurrected.
Both corrupt and corrupting tragically convinces of the power of money however it was made.
The more we read, the more we can see that Gatsby died of his wrong dreams. His life follows a pattern: first, there is a dream, then a disillusion, and finally a sense of failure. In the novel, the modern men live in sterility and meaninglessness, and futility. Take the party for example
The Beautiful and Damned (美丽的与遭诅咒的)
All the Sad Young Men (所有悲伤的年轻人)

Ernest Hemingway(1898-1961)海明威
Spokesman of “the Lost Generation”（迷惘的一代）
“The Lost Generation” is a literary school popular in America in 1920s. “The Sun Also Rises”， which paints the image of the lost generation and made Hemingway famous，became its representative work.. Men and women in the generation were caught in the war and cut off from the old values and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad.
 Life story
Born in Oak Park, Illinois. His father was fond of hunting and fishing and usually took him on his trips, so many of his books are about sports terms such as hunting and fishing. He went to the Kansas City Star and worked as a reporter. Then he was recruited as an ambulance driver and went to Europe. In 1918, he was seriously wounded in the knee in Italy. His war experience proved so shattering and nightmarish that his life and writing were permanently affected. He continued to write about it to relieve it and forget it. He married four times, but did not understand women. He won Nobel Prize in 1954. In 1961, he committed suicide with his pistol because of the suffering from illness.
Hemingway style:
Lean, economic structure, short sentences and paragraphs, vigorous and positive language. He preferred words that are concrete, specific, simple more commonly found, casual and conversational, and avoided gorgeous adjectives.
Symbolic theme－iceberg style: 1/8 is above the water, 7/8 is under the water. Many of his writings are symbolic, and there are sometimes 11 themes.
Hemingway Hero－Code Hero (准则英雄): They show something in common: desperate courage and grace under pressure. His heroes maintain dignity, honor, courage and grace in face of danger, violence and death. They are wounded but strong, more sensitive and wounded because stronger, enjoys the pleasure of life in face of ruin and death. They hold such a concept of life: it is dangerous and always ready to defeat and destroy you, but that, if you keep calm and stand on your set of principles, you may win on your own terms. (Hemingway himself acted out the theme of his novels. When Spanish Civil War broke out, he went to Spain as a reporter and stood side by side with Spanish people in their anti-Fascist war. During World War II, he went to Europe again and even joined in the battle to liberate Paris. He came to China with his wife. He went hunting in Africa, went fishing in Cuba, and watched bullfighting in Spain. He had had car accidents and air crash, but survived. Once, his plane in Africa was destroyed severely, and newspaper reported his death. While the whole world was mourning over the falling of a literary star, he was reading the news with great pleasure.
  The Sun Also Rises太阳照常升起
 Farewell to Arms (永别了, 武器)
 For Whom the Bell Tolls (丧钟为谁而鸣)
The Torrents of Spring (春天的急流)
The Old Man and the Sea (老人与海) 
As a war writer, he mainly shows the effect of war on people’s spirit. His war novels reveal that though the wound is not serious, the torture in spirit is forever, and it makes people desperate. All of his stories ended in sadness.
The Sun Also Rises：The novel narrates a group of expatriates making a trip to watch the bullfight.
The characters include: Jake Barns, an American who fought in Italy and was made impotent by a war wound; Bill Gordon, Jake’s friend and his fishing companion; Lady Brett, an English woman who is beautiful but morally degenerating, Mike who follows Brett hoping to marry her. The early part is set in Paris, focused on the parting and despair with the expatriates. In the middle part we find Bill and Jake fishing and recovering themselves up in the mountains. Barns fell in love with Brett, but as he was sexual impotent (a token of modern man’s spiritual impotence), Brett later got involved in an erotic triangle with Mike and Cohn, another character. All of them were seen wandering pointlessly and restless and impotent, enjoying things like fishing, swimming, a bullfight and beauties of nature but aware all the while that the world is crazy and meaningless and futile. Their whole life is undercut and defeated. Jake, the protagonist, is taken as the code hero in the novel. He comes to see that, in a world in which “all is vanity and vexation of spirit”, there is nothing one can do but to take care of one’s own life and be tough against fate and tough with grace under pressure. The only strength to live on with any dignity comes from nowhere but himself. 
Chapter 15
William Faulkner (1897-1962) 福克纳
1． Nobel Prize winner in 1949, regarded as the greatest writer in the 20thC.
2． Regionalist. The story is always concerned in the certain region.
Faulkner was born into a southern family with a fairly long history. His own family, the members of his family became his source of fiction. He wrote something in southern America.
The features of southern America:
1. sense of guilt. The selling and buying slaves, class distinction made the southern writers face the race problem.
2. the sense of failure. In the Civil War, the south experienced failure, so the southern writers have pessimistic view toward the world In their writings. They expose the evil side of human beings: hatred, cruelty, violence, vulgarity, selfishness, jealousy, and unbalance.
3. the sense of frustration. It came after the Civil War. In the development, they felt they were left behind. So they writers tried to know what was wrong with themselves.
Subject matter of Faulkner
1. The declining aristocratic class, the noble. His novels have been termed the Yoknapatawpha saga because many of his works is one connected story that happens in Yok and the characters are interwoven. He wrote about the histories of a number of southern aristocratic families, and traced them back to the very beginning when the Indians were still lawful owners of the land. In the very rise of these family fortunes, Faulkner saw their inevitable fall. These white settlers may have dreams, built great houses with confidence and courage, and achieved a degree of success in the golden past. But they can not escape the defeat to which they are doomed from the very outset, for they have displaced the Indians and enslaved the black race.