This Side of Paradise (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free

during study periods and over long weekends in the officer’s club. Bruccoli notes that Fitzgerald was a poor soldier and considered the army an impediment to his writing. He got leave in February 1918 and returned to Princeton to the Cottage Club (the social “eating club” to which he belonged, much like one of today’s fraternities), where he completed his novel and sent it to Anglo-Irish author and mentor Shane Leslie, who in turn sent it to Charles Scribner’s Sons.
    In June 1918 Fitzgerald was sent to Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama, where he met eighteen-year-old Zelda Sayre and fell in love. In August of that year Scribner’s rejected “The Romantic Egotist” claiming, “The story does not seem to us to work up to a conclusion,” and “Neither the hero’s career nor his character are shown to be brought to any stage which justifies an ending” (West, The Making of This Side of Paradise, p. 73). Fitzgerald revised it and sent it back, only to have the revision rejected again in October 1918. By then he was desperate for Zelda to marry him, but she was reluctant because of his instability and his questionable finances. After the war ended, he was finally discharged from the army, never having seen active service. Eager for economic and literary success, he returned to his birthplace, St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1919. There he holed up on the top floor of his parents’ house, lived on Coke and cigarettes, and wrote steadily during what he later termed “a long summer of despair” in the hope that a published novel would win him the hand of Zelda Sayre. And it paid off. The work was published in 1920 with enormous success. Fitzgerald had spent two years writing and revising This Side of Paradise before it was accepted for publication.
    The final version of the novel leaves much to be desired for the reader who is looking for a straightforward plot and a focused narration. As James L. W. West remarks in the introduction to the Cambridge Edition of This Side of Paradise, “Its structure is haphazard, its writing uneven, and its characters inconsistent” because Fitzgerald took a great body of his own writing—short stories, poems, sketches, a one-act play, and parts of a previous attempt at a novel—to fashion his narrative (p. xiii). Furthermore, some of the episodes are made up of stories written over a considerable period of time, which accounts for the differences in tone and the lack of unity in the narrative.
    Fitzgerald is the omniscient, non-participant, third-person narrator, narrating the actions, thoughts, and feelings of the central character, Amory Blaine. Although the narration is consistent through book one, the interlude section inserted between books one and two consists only of two letters, much of them poetry, and the reader is left to infer from their addresses and content that Amory has gone off to war in France. Fitzgerald writes chapter one of book two, entitled “The Débutante,” as a short play, narrating it from an objective or dramatic point of view. This crucial episode involves Amory’s experience with Rosalind, which is the crux of his later heartbreak, but it is only in the following chapter, “Experiments in Convalescence,” that readers understand the depths of Amory’s despair. Fitzgerald switches back to third-person omniscient narration, and we realize that Amory’s alcoholic binges are the result of his break-up with Rosalind. Nevertheless, Fitzgerald overcomes the momentary confusion of his narrative with his lively style and vivid observation, and engages his readers with his story. Ironically, this very lack of unity and combination of styles was considered avant-garde for its time. As Bruccoli notes, This Side of Paradise “was received in 1920 as an iconoclastic social document—even a testament of revolt. Surprisingly, it was regarded as an experimental or innovative narrative because of the mixture of styles and the inclusion of plays and verse”