Abstract

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald is one of the most important and outstanding authors of novels and short stories in the American literature history of the 20th century. With his legendary life, he is widely praised by the world of Western literary criticism as the spokesman of “the Lost Generation” of the 1920s. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is the most typical among Fitzgerald’s 160 short stories, narrating Benjamin Button’s special life from an old man coming into the world to a baby dying of brain death, and the theme is about the disillusion of life. Along with the development of movie and television works as the new media, it can be seen that the adaptation from literary works into movies nothing but conforms to the trends of the era and keeps pace with the passing of times. In 2008, the director David Leo Fincher put Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on the screen, making it among the contemporary classics. But plots and the themes were changed greatly. The disillusion and the emptiness of life were changed to the eternal love and the quest for the value of life.
The thesis at first takes advantage of the narrative theories to analyze the different modes adopted by the literature and the movie to relate the story, and then points out that the distinctive attributive characters of the literature and the movie determine their plots, structures, clues, points of view, and means. Next, the original gives a faithful representation of the time of Fitzgerald - in the light of the breakup of the first economic crisis after the Second World War, the “American Dream” was shattered. Besides, it reveals Fitzgerald’s personal experiences - the ideal love vanished; all of these result in the theme of the original - soberly and thoroughly condemning the selfishness and indifference of the human nature; on the contrary, such a work, composing an epic for the life, death and love, warmly praises the brilliance and glory of the human nature in the movie.

Keywords: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button  novel  movie theme  consistency      migration

摘要

菲茨杰拉德是20世纪美国文学史上一位重要杰出的小说家，被西方文学评论界誉为“爵士时代”代言人。《本杰明·巴顿奇事》是菲茨杰拉德一百六十部短篇小说之中富有奇幻特色的代表作，故事贯穿主人公本杰明与众不同的一生。从出生时的耄耋老朽，到婴儿般无知无觉的脑死亡。上个世纪随着作为新媒体文化的影视作品发展，文学作品翻拍成电影无非是顺应时代的潮流，实乃“与时俱进”之举。2008年，导演大卫·芬奇将《本杰明·巴顿奇事》搬上银幕，使得这部小说原著跻身当代经典行列。但是影片不仅在情节上大加改动，在主题的诉诸上也将原作中爱的幻灭与人生的虚无转化为爱的永恒和人生意义的追寻。
本文运用文学和电影的叙事理论，分析了小说与电影中的故事在生成过程中所依靠的手段，指出小说与电影在属性上的不同决定了原著和影片采用不同的叙事情节、叙事结构、叙事线索、叙事角度、以及叙事手段。第三部分以原著和影片创作背景为基础，揭示了从小说到电影的主题迁移。二战后，第一次经济危机爆发，“美国梦”破灭，小说不仅是那个时代的真实写照，更是揭露了菲茨杰拉德的个人经历——爱情的幻灭。小说冷峻而透彻的谴责了人性的自私，而电影积极而温暖的宣扬了人性的美好。

关键词：《本杰明·巴顿奇事》；小说；电影；主题；继承；迁移