Dream and Reality

The work is based on the life of The French impressionist painter Paul Gauguin. The male role, Charles Strickland, a conventional London stockbroker, decides in midlife to desert his wife, family, business, and civilization for his art. It’s pretty incredible for a middle-aged man to give up everything to pursue the art. From an outsider's point of view, middle-aged people should maintain a stable life and focus on their families. But Charles Strickland give another example. He abandons what others see as a rich and happy life, writes his own brilliant life with a brush, and pours all the value of life into the colorful canvas. It’s the protest of romance against the commonplace of life. The work presents the conflict between ideal and reality. The moon symbolizes ideal, the sixpence symbolizes reality. In the ordinary life, everyone has extraordinary pursuit. One of the features of the work is the strongly modernity. The modernity of the Moon and Sixpence is first manifested in its conceptuality. In the Moon and the Sixpence, Maugham ostensibly describes the fate and encounter of the protagonist, but in fact reflects his own thinking on the relationship between art and life. Tightly wrapped around the hero Charles Strickland what is problem of the mind is the essence of art, how to deal with the relationship between art and experience, traditional means of expression, reliable, and to control the modern thinking of a new form of exploration, after a constant twists and turns, Charles Strickland, woke up the autonomy of art is great independence, different narrative point of view, will get a different result. Real life is real ugly cruel, so the surface of elegant art is only a gloss on reality, the essence of art is false. Strickland in the novel also shows the extreme distrust of traditional art means, this kind of feeling to his difficulties in painting performance, once fall into the predicament of the silent imitation between inaction, have to find new ways to suit oneself to express, Maugham add to the problem of art in the novel has a strong conceptual thinking makes novel, the idea makes the novel has a rich complex multiple meanings, through the surface and deep, narrative and ideas, make the novel tension and has a broad connotation, show a strong characteristic of the modern novel. The other feature of the novel is the complex contradiction. As Rousseau said, Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Life in this world has its limits. Family, wife, wealth, everything can be restriction. If you pursue sixpence, you have to give up the moon. The tragic life of the hero shows me that real life is real ugly cruel, so the surface of elegant art is only a gloss on reality, the essence of art is false. It is not easy to abandon all to pursuit the ideals. In the Chinese history, also exists the same people. For example, Li Bai, who devoted himself into literature, pursued freedom and romance. From the perspective of history, they are not alone. Only when they devoted themselves to art did the series of works of art that we see today emerge.