This Side of Paradise

 

This Side of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Barnes & Nobles Classics

(for those of you following along at home)

 

This Side of Paradise is very much involved with dreams. Amory, especially throughout the early years of his development, is portrayed as a dreamer. In Minneapolis he would “dream one his favorite waking dreams (18).” At St. Regis, “his mind was crowded with dreams of athletic prowess” (23). In New York, he walked “dreaming on the music that eddied out of the cafes” (30). After the St. Regis football season he “slumped into dreamy content” (31) and is described as “dreaming awake” (31). At Princeton he was “dreamily acquiescent” (51) and spent “dreamy evening on the court of Cottage” (77).

And the narration does not reserve the description for Amory. In speaking about American women, Beatrice “became dreamy” (8). Before Amory kissed her, “Myra’s eyes became dreamy” (15). Isabelle is described as “the inviolate dreamer of Joan-like dreams” (66). The spires and towers of Princeton become “dreaming peaks” (51) and the college “dreamed on – awake” (52).

The distinction between sleeping – dreaming – and being awake is blurred. After a night of drinking and terrifying visions in New York, Amory stumbles around the city and we are told that he “must have fallen asleep again, for when he next recollected himself he had paid the hotel bill and was stepping into a taxi” (108). The narrator tells us this as if unimpressed that he could pay a hotel bill while asleep. Even the interlude in which the storytelling form shifts to that of a play (the beginning of book two) could be said to be a narrative blurring of reality. This change in form, with its scene descriptions, stage directions, and character names associated with each statement, call attention to the unreality of the entire story. (It’s difficult to “get lost” in the reality of a story when we see the directions for how the “actors” should enact it.)

But as immersed as this novel is with dreams, it may be more interested in what happens when awoken, often suddenly, from those dreams. There is an often used narrative pattern in this novel in which a character is day dreaming or distracted, and is shortly thereafter, abruptly disturbed and brought back to reality. While watching a play in New York, Amory “took his mind of the play, and he wondered if he really did seem handsome.” His wandering thoughts were disturbed when his friend “broke in a melancholy strain on Amory’s musings” (30). In saying goodbye to Isabelle at the end of a party, “for an instant he [Amory] lost his poise, and she [Isabelle] felt a bit rattled.” But a “satirical voice” called out and brought them back to their senses (66).  On the night of the car accident, “the exhilaration of the road went to Amory’s head. He had the ghost of two stanzas of a poem forming in his mind…” But then “they jolted to a stop, and Amory peered up, startled” (79). After the night when Amory and Isabelle had their final argument, he awoke, “with a glad flood of consciousness,” until that is disturbed when “the memory of the night before came to him” (87). With the start of prohibition, the narrator makes this sleep-awake metaphor clear, declaring outright that “he [Amory] awoke one morning to find that the old bar-to-bar days were over.” He had awoken from his drinking dreams to the reality of prohibition.

Perhaps the greatest example of this pattern is what happens between Chapters two and three of book one. Chapter two ends in a dream. Amory calling Isabelle’s name “half involuntarily,” Isabelle running into his outstretched arms, their lips first touching. If the scene seems over-the-top, almost farcical in its emotions (this overwhelming display comes after they are separated only to change for dinner), the narrator is aware of that as well, telling us that it was “as in the storybooks” (83). But after a break between chapters, chapter three picks up at exactly the next moment with the awakening exclamation of “Ouch! Let me go!”(84) It is such a drastic reversal from the end of Chapter two, which leaves the two lovers in a blissful embrace. This awakening, brought about by a prick from Amory’s shirt stud (which would be an effective way to literally wake someone up) tears the lovers from their dream and so suddenly brings their relationship to its quick and unexpected conclusion.

This novel is about expectations being broken, reality disturbing fantasy. Such is true for Amory, but it also seems true for his entire generation. World War I, which haunts the background for part of this story, is an example of such broken expectations. As Sharon Carson writes in her introduction to this edition, “the young people of the 1920s questioned the absurdity of this “Great War,” the value system of a civilization that had created it, and the beliefs of their elders who had supported it” (XIX). This Side of Paradise, she argues, takes up that disgruntled voice and “examines and rejects the romantic idealism of the Victorian past and reluctantly embraces the troubling uncertainties of the future.” In the Jazz Age, America’s youth had awoken from the Victorian dream.

After Monsignor Darcy’s death, Amory’s disillusion becomes evident (in fact, the word “disillusion” starts to appear almost as often as “dreams” had in the earlier part of the novel). He has lost faith in many of the institutions and beings who had shaped his life, or maybe, his dreams; the literary and the intellectual (“Amory had grown up to a thousand books, a thousand lies,” “the Byrons and Brookes who had defied life from mountain tops were in the end but flaneurs and poseurs”), women (Women – of whom he had expected so much…had become merely consecrations to their own posterity”), and religion (“Monsignor, upon whom a cardinal had rested, had moments of strange and horrible insecurity”) (244-45). This disillusion culminates in his discussion with the Big Man with Goggles, a discussion that could very well be Amory, or even Fitzgerald, speaking for the entire generation (“I’m restless. My whole generation is restless”) (256). The day of this discussion even reflects its nature, as it was “a day easily associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or fade out in mocking laughter by the light of the moon” (247).

But regardless of this disillusioned cry, Amory recognizes the inability to completely break from the “spirit of the past,” which was now “brooding over a new generation…still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets” (260). And for Amory, the disillusion that was brought by those broken expectations, his waking up, had contributed to his persona. It had “left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life,” and even, for Amory the dreamer, “the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams.” In the end, his certainty and self assuredness from the beginning of the novel, is replaced with something more mixed, as Amory declares “I know myself…but that is all” (261).

Next time...

I'll be reading A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway. (Scribner, ISBN: 978-0-864-80146-9).