CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
This chapter provides a discussion of the
background of the study, statements of the problem, objectives of the study,
scope and limitation, significance of the study, research method, and
definition of the key terms.
1.1 Background of the Study Most
people like an interesting story of a novel. A good novelist is able to present
an incredible story by applying some elements of the novel to make the product
perfect. A good story of the novel is written by presenting intrinsic and extrinsic
elements to the readers supported by a detailed picture about how people act in
their life.
Writing a good novel is not as
easy as reading it. Creating a novel is not as easy as making a notebook
because the writer of the novel or other literary works must be able to cover a
beautiful story and a wonderful language in his or her work. A good story
without good language is like a garden without flowers.
Therefore, many writers picture
the story of their social environment on their literary work to make the story
real.
According to Waluyo (1994:6),
education also gives color to the writer’s work. A literary work written by a
doctor, economist, psychologist, sociologist, or a teacher has its own
experiences in showing the writer’s special profession. The writers who live in
a university could picture the detailed information of the university environment on their works.
Therefore, the environment where the writers live can influence their works.
Therefore, there are many novels which portray the writer’s own life,
especially their social condition.
According to Abrams (1969: 15), a
novel that is based on the life of the author is called an autobiographical
novel. The writers somewhat draw their own experiences in most of their work.
Writing an autobiography novel seems to be a difficult thing because it
presents not only the history of someone’s life but also the emotion of the
characters. The author should write any detailed information amazingly in
his/her autobiographical novel because it will build the readers’ emotion and
impression.
Autobiographical document can be
found in all cultures and all ages, but autobiography as a deliberate literary
product is brought into existence only under certain conditions. The Romantic
age, for example, when introspection and extreme self-awareness were part of
the prevailing intellectual climate, produced a number of genuinely
autobiographical testaments, and in the th
century, many writers such us Goethe in German, Rousseau in France, Wordsworth
in England, and Thoreau in America, to name some, are only a few examples of
the author of biographical work (Chase, 1978:98).
Hughes (1998:803-804) states that
autobiography, as a literary form, is to be distinguished from the type of self
–revelation which is most closely related to the diary, journal, and memoir.
Diary is a record of daily experience, the preservation of the day-by-day
process of one’s own life, without regarding the patterned development,
narrative continuity, or dramatic movement toward a climax; it also often achieves continuity but
does so intermittently and without conscious design. Autobiography sees
separate occurrences, even in early life, as moving toward and completing a pattern
finally achieved in later life.
The memoir devotes more attention
to the occurrences around and outside the writer than to the writer
him/herself. From the memoir, people learn a great deal about the society in
which the subject of the memoirs moves, but little about the writer
him/herself. Memoirs have often been written by politicians or military leaders
as a way to record and publish an account of their public exploitation. On the
other hand, an autobiography not only records the events of the writer’s life time,
charting in great detail the movement of social reform, but also notes those events
as they affect the autobiographer him/herself. Therefore, it can be concluded
that a memoir is slightly different from an autobiography.
Traditionally, an autobiography
focuses on the “life and time” of the character, while a memoir has a narrower,
more intimate focus on his or her own memories, feelings, and emotions (Holman
1969:238).
Abrams (1969:16) adds that
journal concentrates on the interior life of the writer, often excludes events
outside the reveries or meditations of the author.
Sometimes journal is more a lyric
celebration of innocent solitude than a diary or autobiography, and it
primarily concerns with the writer’s developing artistic craft, not with his or
her exterior life. In some instances, all the related form of diary, memoir,
journal, and autobiography may be welded together to achieve a particularly
thorough review of one’s life or potion of it.
An autobiography has been
provoked by a variety of motives. It may
be confessional, in which the motive is to unburden oneself of a feeling of
guilt, apologetic, in which the writer attempts to declare and justify the
course of his or her life of a particular action, exploratory, in which the act
of writing is used as a research tool and a probing into unexamined behavioral
patterns, or simply egocentric, in which the writer assumes that his or her
life is worth sharing with others. The autobiographical impulse has often been
satisfied not in autobiography but in literary work of more than usual personal
import (www.encarta.msn.com/biography.html).
Some authors write a novel in the
form of autobiographical novel. One of the authors who like writing his
personal experiences is F. Scott Fitzgerald. He is a popular and successful
writer almost from the beginning of his career. During his professional career,
a period of just twenty years, he has finished four novels, left a fifth
unfinished, and wrote dozens of short stories that treat themes of youth, despair,
and age. He often uses his personal experiences and sometimes his wife’s experiences
as the sources of his writing. Willet states, “F. Scott Fitzgerald enjoyed fame
and fortune, and his novels reflected his life style” (Willet, 2000; 1).
One of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
novels which are considered as the reflection of his youth story is This Side
of Paradise. It is one of his novels which is categorized as autobiographical
novel which tells about his life and love story (Connor, 1964; 94).
In This Side of Paradise, F.
Scott Fitzgerald tells about the main character (Amory Blaine). He has studied
in American ‘prep’ School St. Reggie’s in Connecticut just before he goes to war. He is
a wealthy and attractive Princeton University student who dabbles in literature
and has a series of romances that eventually lead to his disillusionment. He
studies in Princeton for about months.
This boy likes writing a poem and reading most of American popular novels.
While at the end of his duty as a second lieutenant, he meets a nice girl named
Rosalind. It seems that the story has a relation to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life.
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