摘要

      威廉•萨默赛特•毛姆的小说《月亮和六便士》成书于1919年，正是第二次工业革命完成时期，资本主义得到极大发展，西方中产阶级生活富裕，物质世界丰富，但精神世界得不到满足，致使心灵空虚。本文通过三个方面分析书中主人公斯特里克兰德的出走所反映出的理想与现实的矛盾，分别是他的社会责任与心中理想的矛盾、公众舆论与他的坚持理想的矛盾、社会趋势与他追求理想的矛盾。继而探讨在大的社会背景下，人们普遍的追逐金钱的心理如何压抑深藏在我们内心深处的理想，从而探讨如何平衡理想和现实的矛盾。

关键词：理想；现实；矛盾

Abstract

The Moon and Sixpence, written by W.Somerset Maugham, was finished in 1919.It was just at the end of the second industrial revolution. With the great development of capitalism, the material life of the western upper-middle class was rich and abundant. However, their prosperous material world could not meet the needs of their spiritual world. Their soul was empty. In this paper, the author will analyze Strickland’s escapes and the conflicts between ideal and reality that his behavior reflected. There are three aspects, including conflicts between Strickland’s social responsibilities and his pursuit of the dream, conflicts between public opinion and Strickland’s persistence, and conflicts between the pecuniary society and Strickland’s ideal. Then the author will discuss how this pecuniary society suppress our ideal and furthermore, how we balance the conflicts between ideal and reality.

Key words: ideal; reality; conflict

1.  Introduction
1.1 Story Summary
William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) has been a world-famous British                    novelist and playwright since the 1890s. All of his works have been translated into a great number of languages and enjoyed a high reputation among readers all over the world. Maugham’s novels mostly focus on human nature. Among them, Of Human Bondage and The Moon and Sixpence are the most famous. This paper is about the latter.
Strickland, the leading character of The moon and Sixpence, is a weird talented painter whose story is ostensibly based on Paul Gauguin, the famous French impressionist painter. Strickland is a broker of the United Kingdom stock exchange. He has a solid career, predominant social status and a happy family. In the first forty years of his lifetime, everyone has no sense of his desire of painting, including himself. However, all of a sudden, he becomes a zealot for painting and leaves everything behind in London and starts his vagrant painting life. No one can understand his crazy behavior. Living in a foreign country, He is penniless, sickish and rebarbative. After a series of creep experiences, he finally leaves the civilized world to a hidden island. In that island, Strickland lastly finds his peace of soul and makes his dream come true.