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

(p. 117).
    Fitzgerald’s intent in writing the book, in spite of its haphazard structure, was clear to him from the beginning. He wrote in his manuscript: “I’m trying to set down the story part of my generation in America and put myself in the middle as a sort of observer and conscious factor” (Bruccoli, p. 80). Fitzgerald’s romantic idea is that the thoughts and feelings of the central character as a “sort of observer and conscious factor” are of paramount importance, and that the truth of a thing is measured by one’s depth of feeling about it. The concept of the primary importance of individual consciousness, emerging as a key tenet in modernist texts of the time, was influenced by Ezra Pound’s work in the magazine The Egoist and by popular Freudian psychology. The technique of narrating a period of confusion and maturation through a single consciousness is evident in the work of several of Fitzgerald’s contemporaries: James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1924), and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). It appears later in such other works as J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1972), by Alix Kates Shulman.
    Fitzgerald writes that he is not only “an observer and conscious factor” in This Side of Paradise, but that he is writing “a somewhat edited history of me and my imagination.” He confesses in the “author’s apology” to the original edition that even though he didn’t want to talk about himself, “I’ll admit I did that somewhat in this book.” The thinly disguised account of his youth in St. Paul, Minnesota, his time (1911-1913) at the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey, and his years at Princeton (1913-1917) constitute the main time span of the plot. The novel goes beyond these years to suggest that Amory Blaine, closely modeled on Fitzgerald himself, fights in France in World War I, although Fitzgerald never entered the war. Many of the characters in the novel are based on Fitzgerald’s friends at Princeton, and Bruccoli notes the similarities in his biography of Fitzgerald:
    Amory Blaine is a rather idealized Fitzgerald; Monsignor Darcy is Fay; Thomas Parke D’Invilliers is John Peale Bishop; and Burne Holiday is loosely based on Henry Strater ... Isabelle is recognizably Ginevra King, but Rosalind is a combination of Zelda and Beatrice Normandy from H. G. Wells’ Tono-Bungay. Eleanor Savage was invented from Fay’s experiences, and Beatrice Blaine was drawn from the mother of one of Fitzgerald’s friends (pp. 123-124).
    Fitzgerald informs his readers of his autobiographical intent when he says that Amory and his friends had “struck on certain books, a definite type of biographical novel that Amory christened ‘quest’ books” (p. 111). In the “quest” book the hero sets off in life to discover the best use for his talents, with the idea that using them wisely according to a certain code will ensure social and economic success. During Amory’s quest, he does what most young people do today; predictably, he conforms to “fit in.” As part of his struggle to succeed, he tries to devise a strategy to live up to the prescribed Victorian ideals of propriety, sobriety, and hard work. One way he does this is to read dozens of young-adult books that were popular at the time, such as Booth Tarkington’s The Gentleman from Indiana (1899), Owen Johnson’s Stover at Yale (1911), and Compton MacKenzie’s Sinister Street (1913).
    But none of Amory’s strategies work. Try as he might, Amory discovers more loss and frustration than gain and satisfaction. His classmates and teachers frequently see him as a misfit, or as someone who tries too hard to gain popularity and prestige, or as a person too obsessed with being important. The title of book one, “The Romantic Egotist,” is the reader’s clue to Amory’s failure. At this early