《THE GREAT GATSBY：了不起的盖茨比（英文朗读版）》首次出版于1925年，20世纪美国著名小说家F·S·菲茨杰拉德代表作，被视为美国文学“爵士时代”的象征，曾入选20世纪百部最佳英文小说，20世纪50年代后的数十年间一度成为美国高中、大学文学课的标准教材。小说以未成名作家尼克的视角出发，全面展现了美国20年代纸醉金迷的上层社会生活，人与人之间的虚情寡义，以及“美国梦”在幻想、爱情与谎言中的破灭。
《THE GREAT GATSBY：了不起的盖茨比（英文朗读版）》为英文原版，配朗读录音，免费下载，是英语学习的最佳原版读物之一。
Described as "the great
American novel", The Great Gatsby has become a standard text for
generations of American students and one of the most beloved books of all time.
First published on April 10, 1925, The Great Gatsby is set on Long
Island''s North Shore
and in New York City
during the summer of 1922. It is a critique of the American Dream. The novel
takes place following the First World War. American society enjoyed having
unprecedented levels of prosperity during the "roaring" 1920s as the
economy soared. At the same time, Prohibition, the ban on the sale
and manufacture of alcohol as mandated by
the Eighteenth Amendment, made millionaires out of bootleggers. After its
republishing in 1945 and 1953, it quickly found a wide readership and is today
widely regarded as a paragon of the Great American Novel, and a literary
classic. The Great Gatsby has become a standard text in high school and
university courses on American literature in countries around the world, and is
ranked second in the Modern Library''s lists of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century.
In
my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world
haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He
didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood
that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I’m 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 confidences were unsought—frequently
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 infinite 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 don’t care what it’s
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 reaction—Gatsby 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 flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament” —it 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 find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby,
what foul dust floated 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 we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch,
but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s
brother who came here in fiftyone, sent a substitute to the Civil War and
started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.
I never
saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look
like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled
painting that hangs in Father’s office. 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
center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the
universe— so 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 finally said, “Why—ye-es” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father
agreed to finance 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 find 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 office 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 firm ordered him to Washington and I went
out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until
he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked
breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.
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