On the Disillusioned Youth: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “This Side of Paradise”

It may be superfluous to stipulate that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut This Side of Paradise (1920) is still remarkably relevant to our times, but a valid idea bears repeating, and those who have enjoyed and witnessed Fitzgerald’s literary finesse in this challenging first work would most certainly not mind being reminded of exactly why this novel, published almost a century ago now, still reflects our youths today.

This Side of Paradise (a phrase derived from Rupert Brooke’s poem “Tiare Tahiti”) concerns Amory Blaine, a Princetonian convinced of his own intellectual brilliance (“Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory…” [19]), but never quite finding his niche, stumbling from one love affair to another, perennially wondering what life has in store for an exceptional mind like his. During the course of the novel, he removes himself from the highly regulated world of his mother’s, seeks knowledge in literary classics, makes fair-weather friends at Princeton, loses his heart to girls who have yet to learn true love, joins the war, returns to the US penniless, questions his faith in God, and, most significant of all, comes to terms with disillusionment. Never mind that Fitzgerald modelled Amory on himself (Fitzgerald’s courtship of Zelda Sayre had ended in disaster in 1919, which drove him to seek comfort in alcohol, though the novel’s success upon publication brought them back together, and he had attended Princeton between 1913 and 1917). Amory may be how Fitzgerald saw himself: handsome (like Rupert Brooke, the English poet famed for his good looks), highly cultured, intelligent, ambitious, and restless; but Amory could also easily be any ordinary young intellectual living in 1920’s America. The generation that Gertrude Stein would come to call une génération perdue was what Fitzgerald had in mind when putting together This Side of Paradise. (“Putting together” is the correct term for it as the novel is largely a collage.) Its depiction of a young man who cannot decide on the “right” way to live is typical of the post-war generation, which had lost sight of the meaning and purpose of life when the war revealed to the world the hideous face of human nature. Some of the most provocative passages concerning “spiritual progress” come towards the end of the novel. In a conversation with the “big man with goggles” (who later turns out to be the father of a Princetonian friend of his who had died in the war), Amory questions the married man, saying that he becomes “nine times out of ten, a conservative as far as existing social conditions are concerned” (252).  When asked why the unmarried man is superior, he says:

Opposed is the man who, being spiritually unmarried, continually seeks for new systems that will control or counteract human nature. His problem is harder. It is not life that’s complicated. It’s the struggle to guide and control life. That is his struggle. He is a part of progress – the spiritually married man is not (254).

This passage demonstrates that Amory’s generation deems it essential to “control or counteract human nature.” In order for them to do so, they have to remain physically and spiritually unattached. If they do not struggle to “guide and control life,” there will never be any progress, and the human race will be doomed to destruction.

In a later passage, Amory, in response to another man’s assertion that human nature is unalterable, states vehemently that he believes the opposite is true:

I can name offhand over one hundred natural phenomena that have been changed by the will of man – a hundred instincts in man that have been wiped out or are now held in check by civilization. What this man here just said has been for thousands of years the last refuge of the associated mutton-heads of the world. It negates the efforts of every scientist, statesmen, moralist, reformer, doctor, and philosopher that ever gave his life to humanity’s service (257).

Amory’s idealism (there is no other term for it) is a natural by-product of disillusionment. In order for him to soldier on (he says his generation is “restless”), he has to believe, like most youths of our time, that change is a possibility.

Change can only take place if one questions the existing ideas and institutions. Amory therefore questions the capitalist construct (“I’m sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her” [259]), morality (what does unselfishness entail?), the concept of beauty, and God (“… there was a certain intrinsic lack in those to whom orthodox religion was necessary…” [262]). Fitzgerald does not provide cookie-cutter answers for Amory. Even when the novel reaches its final page, Amory’s ideas are “still in riot” (263). Questions still haunt and taunt him, and he is not sure if “the struggle was worth while” (264). His search for identity is a life-long process and will probably never come to an end.

The reader then comes to the novel’s famous last line: “I know myself,” he cried, “but that’s all” (264). Perhaps this is Fitzgerald’s way of saying that even though it has been a long and hard struggle, in the end the reward is self-knowledge – and that is something no man could ever disparage.

All page numbers refer to the 2009 Vintage Classics edition.