This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
In both style and form, This Side of Paradise is Fitzgerald's novel of apprenticeship because he is clearly striving to demonstrate both his technical virtuosity and his seriousness in purpose (Kahn 39). To display his mastery of literary form, Fitzgerald creates a novel that is a pastiche of poems, letters, lists, and even a play in three acts embedded within a prose narrative (123). At some times the novel seems movie or film-like. This is illustrated by the chapters being subdivided into subheadings such as "Snapshots of the Young Egotist" and "The Superman Grows Careless". The effect of these various narrative strategies is original and exuberant, conveying the brash self-confidence of Fitzgerald and his fictional hero (123). It also conveys a youthful enthusiasm perfectly in sync with its time and place, helping to develop the plot's structure and style. Fitzgerald divides the plot of his novel into two books. Book One, entitled "The Romantic Egotist," focuses on Amory's childhood, youth at a prep school and career at Princeton University. Book Two, entitled "The Education of a Personage," shows the process by which Amory gathers stature. Book Two marks the shift of the narrative voice from soliloquy to dramatic monologue (
Clearly, Amory's efforts to attach his dreams to an ideal embodied in a woman are misguided. The ideal is both living and elusive and would lose its power to inspire if it were ever contained or attained (123). Thus, the romantic [Amory] "hopes against hope that things won't last (123). He wants to experience again the thrill of desire and he says it plain and clear: Amory and his friends joke about the ghosts that haunt their lives, laughing that they can be easily dispatched with a stick (123). However, Burne Holiday is more realistic about the need to face them. Burne tells Amory that any imaginative person is bound to have demons, to "[people] the woods with everything ghastly (123)." This thought entails the theme of the power of imagination. He believed that by an effort of will, it is possible for a person to master the horrors of dark as he has. The trick is to stick one's imagination into the dark and to recognize that the horrors are self-created. Yet in the end, Amory comes to believe that present fears are the product of previous experience and that a human being itself is a little more than what a ghost is. In fact, as he bids good-bye to Mr. Ferrenby, towards the end of the novel, Amory reflects with amazement, "What ghosts were people with which to work!" (123). Headstrong and reckless, Eleanor barely conceals a tendency toward self-destruction, and Amory finds it fascinating because it matches his own sense of reckless despair (123). They are both so disillusioned that they can't see the devil in each other. She doesn't even believe there is a God. They are dangerously close to "narcissistic self-destruction, victims of their own egotism" (132). Amory, however, doesn't follow Eleanor to the edge, physically and literally. Eleanor charges on horseback to the edge of a cliff, jumping of the mount but allowing it to fall to its death in her place. "Eleanor was...the last time evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes" (123). At this time Amory is released from the spell of his own dark self. Traces of the past pervade This Side of Paradise, providing the novel with its most suggestive symbol, the ghost. These projections of the mind, born of doubts and fears, delusions and desires, signify the presence of the past. Amory and his peers do battle with them daily yet they are unable and perhaps unwilling to overcome them completely. Amory's first encounter with the presence of the past perhaps explains his ambivalence about the ghosts that haunt his life and mind. Amory finds himself in a hotel room with Asia, a woman he barely knows, on the verge of succumbing to sin. Watching his seduction by evil is the presence of the devil. Soon Amory realizes it was embodied in the image of Dick Humbird, who was killed in an automobile accident, a sad victim of his own excesses (132). Amory, who was reluctant to go with her in the first place, reacts wildly to the vision, running away and screaming for someone "good" and "stupid," the two qualities somehow intermingled for him through previous association, Amory instinctively seeks his salvation through prayer. The personality, according to Darcy, is "active" and "it overrides 'the next thing'" (Fitzgerald 95). In other words it fails to understand the necessity of each step. The personage "gathers and is never thought of apart from what he's done" (Fitzgerald 95). Amory accumulates the power and force to
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Approximate Word count = 2353
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)
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