The Seen and the Unseen: On Reality and Virtual Reality in The Great Gatsby

• Main Authors: Huang, Yi, 黃憶
• Other Authors: Chiou, Yen Bin
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/pkc4b6

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 英國語文學系 === 104 === F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has been regarded as one of the most brilliant literary works that captures the essence of the roaring twenties. In the novel, Fitzgerald takes readers into a full picture of the life of Gatsby, unfolding the life of the glamour in a new world material without being real and the conflicts between social classes. Writing against the lucid narrative strategy, Fitzgerald completes The Great Gatsby with impressive languages, imagery and symbols. The present thesis would like to adopt theories of advertising and photography to examine how the order of presentation and observation is converted at the time when visual perception is inevitably intertwined with subjective imagination. In addition, the present thesis also aims to shed light on the concept of virtual gaze as well as the notion of identity by taking vision from the field of the visible into the field of the virtual. Chapter one begins with the introduction of The Great Gatsby and the methodology used in the present thesis. Chapter two includes literature reviews concerning the issue of seeing and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Chapter three focuses on reviewing the presentation of images used in the mass media and on building the interrelationship among Fitzgerald’s life and the notion of “visibility.” Chapter four pays attention to the concept of “virtual gaze” and its capability to break the boundary between physical eyesight and imagination. Chapter five reconsiders the ambiguity of reality associated with contradictory vision and further validates the value of “virtual gaze.