this side of paradise2

A detailed Summary of this side of paradise2

Many critics have complained, with justice, that a great flaw in This Side of Paradise (aside from its loose, rambling structure) is the fact that the author seems uncertain as to his own attitude. He mocks the romantic delusions or emotional melodrama of his "little rich boy," Amory Blaine, while too often he shares, or seems to share, in the delusions themselves.

There is, in short, a kind of "smart" pseudo-sophistication imbedded within the narrative itself-a series of "clever comments" inserted for the sake of the cleverness rather than for any aesthetic purpose. And one result of this aesthetic self-indulgence is that the reader may find it difficult to take either Amory or his adventures with any degree of seriousness at all. Indeed, one feels as though the author himself were doing what Amory does during the course of the narrative: he merely holds the posture of writing about what actually is a very slight matter.

The need for some sort of imposing or melodramatic gesture is, of course, one of the chief qualities of Amory Blaine as an adolescent. That neither Amory nor his creator-F. Sc

The first chapter of This Side of Paradise is a very important one because it includes many themes which Fitzgerald repeats and amplifies throughout the rest of the novel. Amory, for example, from the very beginning of the book-especially during his early adolescence in Minneapolis and his four years at St. Regis' Academy in Connecticut-is precocious, "romantic," and literally stuffed with gestures that come both from his own rather exotic reading, and from the rootless globe-trotting of his mother. The very title of the chapter ("Amory, Son of Beatrice") is both a parody of Epic genealogy, and clear indication that Amory is a "momma's boy" in a very profound sense of the term.

It is not the actual "kiss" which Amory desires (just as, later in his life, it is not sex itself which he wants), but rather it is the idea of being able to kiss the girl that intrigues him. He is, in short, perpetually fascinated with some imagined and usually baroque shadow of Grand Romance. And this Romance-whether of love, or "success," or "social justice," or "art" or "intellectual pursuits," or "religion" - simply collapses at any touch of sordid reality.

A woman of inherited wealth, Beatrice Blaine is a lovely, charming, superficial, childlike woman who maintains the posture of romance, a mere surface superimposed upon an essentially frigid or infantile refusal to commit herself to anything at all. She is, of course, the prototype for what has come to be known as the "Fitzgerald Woman" - an "enchanting" but essentially parasitic femme fatale whom Fitzgerald the author used so often for his books, and whom (in the person of Zelda) Fitzgerald the man finally married.

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2219
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Miscellaneous