This Side of Paradise (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by F. Scott Fitzgerald Read Free Book Online

glue these strange cumbersome pictures into the scrap-book of his life. It was all like a banquet where he sat for this half-hour of his youth and tried to enjoy brilliant epicurean courses (p. 217).
    His alienation and disillusionment over these losses are the text of the last chapter of the novel, “The Egotist Becomes a Personage.” In this chapter Amory has realized that social posing provides no authentic self and that even though it may be difficult to find happiness within himself, it will be impossible to find it elsewhere. He refers to himself as an “intellectual personage,” someone who will struggle to control his life rather than be controlled by it. He “continually seeks for new systems that will control and counteract human nature.... It is not life that’s complicated, it’s the struggle to guide and control life” (p. 252).
    Amory’s gradual rejection of his illusions extends to those who believed in their certainty: “There were no more wise men; there were no more heroes ... Amory had grown up to a thousand books, a thousand lies; he had listened eagerly to people who pretended to know, who knew nothing. The mystical reveries of saints that had once filled him with awe in the still hours of the night, now vaguely repelled him. The Byrons and Brookes who had defied life from mountain tops were in the end but flaneurs and poseurs, at best mistaking the shadow of courage for the substance of wisdom” (pp. 243-244). At this point, Amory has distanced himself so far from tradition that he thinks even the books of the previous generation are false. The depth of Amory’s disillusionment at this point is aptly described by Kahn: “Women had not proved inadequate to his imagination; philosophers and political leaders canceled out each other’s thoughts; few were the men who were not emotional or intellectual, or spiritual cripples” (p. 61).
    In this ambiguous landscape, devoid of the old landmarks and stripped of the genteel codes of the past, Amory can no longer understand nor control his environment. The world has become a slippery slope under his feet, changing too fast and in too many directions. He is part of “a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken” (pp. 260-261). Amory “knows himself” but that is all. He has dropped his ridiculous poses and put away his youthful illusions, to arrive back where he began, as “the fundamental Amory,” and he has found himself not by imitating his predecessors, but by disavowing them. His break with his past and its traditions suggests the autonomy and alienation of a modernist stance. As Craig Monk remarks, “The necessity of self-knowledge, coupled with the suggested impossibility of being certain about anything else, ultimately makes up the central idea of This Side of Paradise” (“The Political F. Scott Fitzgerald,” p. 64). In the end, that Amory “knows himself” means he knows a great deal—for only one who has a powerful vision of who he is can claim his self. Lionel Trilling observed that Fitzgerald “was perhaps the last notable writer to affirm the romantic fantasy, descended from the Renaissance, of personal ambition or heroism, of life committed to, or thrown away for, some ideal of self” (The Liberal Imagination, p. 249). Thus Fitzgerald’s early hero, who knows only himself, prefigures his later hero, Gatsby, who “springs from a Platonic conception of himself,” an existential being incarnate. And in that very conception, the reader perceives the compelling force of Fitzgerald’s romanticism and the enduring power of his imagination: What the world will not provide for him or for his heroes, he will create. It is a courageous claim for a young man of twenty-three, and a poignant reminder of the passion, despair, and illusions of our youth.
     
    Sharon G. Carson is Professor Emerita in the