📝 您未登录，登录后完成练习可保存成绩、查看最佳记录。
总字符
0
正确字符
0
错误字符
0
错误率
0.00%
耗时(秒)
0
速度 WPM
0
0 / 71
1The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Table of Contents I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX Once again to Zelda Then wear the
2gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted,
3high-bouncing lover, I must have you!" Thomas Parke d'Invilliers I In my younger and more vulnerable years my father
4gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he
5told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." He didn't say any
6more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more
7than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me
8and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this
9quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a
10politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were
11unsought--frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign
12that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the
13terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgements is a
14matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly
15suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. And, after
16boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock
17or 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
18autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more
19riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book,
20was exempt from my reaction--Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is
21an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to
22the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand
23miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name
24of the "creative temperament"--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in
25any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is
26what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the
27abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
28------------------------------------------------------------------------ My family have been prominent, well-to-do
29people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition
30that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother, who
31came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father
32carries on today. I never saw this great-uncle, but I'm supposed to look like him--with special reference to the rather
33hard-boiled painting that hangs in father's office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century
34after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed
35the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West
36now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe--so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew
37was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as
38if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, "Why--ye-es," with very grave, hesitant faces. Father
39agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of
40twenty-two. The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country
41of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a
42commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month,
43but 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
44had 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
45muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove. It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man,
46more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. "How do you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly. I told
47him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually
48conferred on me the freedom of the neighbourhood. And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the
49trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the
50summer. There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young
51breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf
52in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and
53Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college--one
54year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News--and now I was going to bring back all
55such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just
56an epigram--life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all. It was a matter of chance that I
57should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island
58which extends itself due east of New York--and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations
59of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay,
60jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island
61Sound. They are not perfect ovals--like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact
62end--but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual wonder to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless
63a more interesting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size. I lived at West Egg,
64the--well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a
65little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and
66squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal
67affair by any standard--it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side,
68spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It
69was Gatsby's mansion. Or, rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name.
70My 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
71partial view of my neighbour's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires--all for eighty dollars a month.
🎉 全部完成！共 71 行