Similarities and contrasts with Fitzgerald's real life

Carrying the appearance of a semi-autobiographical work, through This Side of Paradise , we will see a jazz era bursting with paradoxes and full of hurt.

FSFitzgerald's debut novel This Side of Paradise

Generation Skeptic

The work revolves around the character Amory Blaine as well as his journey to find love and fame when entering adulthood. Born into a wealthy family, from a young age, he was a young master admired by many people. Being pampered by a very "different" mother, he lived with the belief that he was special, and then carried it into later life, before realizing that everything was just ephemeral.

As a work revolving around the desperate generation of the post-war period, Fitzgerald has built a very typical character image. He is a person with a beautiful appearance, intelligence... but generally quite pale. In This Side of Paradise , Fitzgerald also established reference points, so that we can see that besides his appearance, Amory is fundamentally empty inside.

While the young men at Princeton left many special marks, Amory was always struggling on the path to fame. He found himself inferior to Humbird - the young master of a tycoon, a reference to wealth and playfulness, and Burne - a talented and judgmental person who always knew how to stay ahead of the times... From an individual who thought he was extremely outstanding, Amory quickly realized that he was just a pawn, a "soulless" representative of his era, bland, bland and lacking in individuality.

Fitzgerald's description of him in Princeton and his despair seems to have inspired the novel Brideshead Revisited by the British writer Evelyn Waugh. In the two works, we can see the similarities between the two characters, as well as the major changes in their inner psyches, regarding many issues, from family, love to social upheavals.

If Waugh focused on exploiting the structure of a family that was almost religious to the extreme, then in This Side of Paradise , Fitzgerald focused more on emotions, when through the women who passed through his life, Amory gradually collapsed and had no possibility of recovery, not even career, love or glory...

In this work, the young master of the Blaine family has gone through four love affairs, but all of them were unsuccessful. If Isabelle is a somewhat frivolous girl, then Eleanor, Clara and Rosalind are all points of reference for Amory. These people possess many characteristics that he cannot have. He is not as virtuous as Clara, nor as determined as Eleanor, and in the end, because of his family background, he also lost the Rosalind he loved.

Similar to Waugh, in this work, Fitzgerald also built the main character, Father Thayer Darcy, as a projection for Amory to dialogue with his own middle age. Although not as anti-religious as the work of the English writer, in this work, we can see that in the end, there is no element that can help Amory. In the end, there is only one person left who understands his life, but cannot change or do anything to improve it.

Fitzgerald and his fiancée Zelda

First impression

Perhaps because it was Fitzgerald's first work, the novel has many similarities with Fitzgerald's own life. Most of the characters are reflections of real-life individuals. Among them, Rosalind is Zelda Sayre - Fitzgerald's lover and future wife. It is said that before agreeing to get married, Fitzgerald was not the person Zelda was looking for, because he could not guarantee an income and be able to take care of both of their lives.

However, if Amory in this book appears as a failure, Fitzgerald in real life was very successful in marrying Zelda, thanks to the success of this book. Accordingly, thanks to the success of This Side of Paradise , Fitzgerald quickly became a great writer overnight, and soon after that, money and fame came to him. It was thanks to this generous sum that the marriage between the two was established just one month after the book was published.

Many researchers also point out that Fitzgerald's motivation for publishing the book was largely to marry Zelda. Accordingly, the book does not have a conventional structure, but consists of many rearranged forms, from prose, poetry, stage plays to bibliography as well as the method of writing thoughts. In it, many ideas have appeared in short stories, and this time, the only thing Fitzgerald did was to find a way to link them, from existing works.

Therefore, it can be seen that in This Side of Paradise many valuable images were overlooked and not exploited to the end. One of them is the fantasy elements, when Fitzgerald built the death of Humbrid and the ghosts that often haunted Amory throughout the rest. This was a very suggestive idea, but Fitzgerald at that time only wanted to quickly publish the book, so he unfortunately ignored them.

However, the final chapters also mark the writing of an extremely passionate writer, when he devotes all his attention to social issues, from philosophy, politics , to admitting his own failure. From a child born in the heart of capitalism, then also "killed" by the value of money, for Amory, his journey is going into the dark, knowing that even if it does not bring results, he still tries, and in the end, only to be left with helplessness...

The novelist was very successful in recreating the bohemian life of the intellectual class at that time. It can be seen that with This Side of Paradise , Fitzgerald wrote a typical and thoughtful story of that generation. Although not perfect from beginning to end, This Side of Paradise is also a sign of a later monumental career, with extremely vivid descriptions of a gloomy and skeptical class.

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