At last, I have perused all the novels of Fitzgerald, and now I can officially assert that this particular novel is my favorite. Indeed, it is true that many professional literary critics regard it as the most immature and imperfect work of Fitzgerald. However, I still have a profound affection for it, and nothing will sway my opinion.

This novel is a tale of Amory Blaine. Or perhaps it is a story of Scott Fitzgerald himself? Sometimes, it is arduous to distinguish between the author and the main characters, as there are numerous events and individuals drawn from the writer's life - Princeton, military service in Europe, and the Triangle Literary Club, as well as Monsignor Darcy, Beatrice Blaine, and Clara, who are almost exact replicas of Fitzgerald's closest associates. Nevertheless, we cannot claim that Fitzgerald and Amory Blaine are one and the same. Amory is a collective image of many young people of that era, including Fitzgerald himself.

So, who precisely is this Amory Blaine? Let us explore. The author himself labels him as "The Romantic Egotist." This is not entirely accurate. Amory is self-centered but not necessarily selfish. How is this possible? Let the character speak for himself: "There is no virtue of unselfishness that I cannot use. I can make sacrifices, be charitable, give to a friend, endure for a friend, lay down my life for a friend—all because these things may be the best possible expression of myself; yet I have not one drop of the milk of human kindness." An extraordinary stance, isn't it? And believe me, Amory does indeed live by this statement.

Now, it becomes comprehensible why Amory is an "egoist," but why is he "romantic"? The reason lies in the fact that his perception of life is highly idealized, and his expectations of others are lofty, which often leads to disappointment. Amory can discern that the emotions of many people around him are false, and while he dislikes it on one hand, on the other hand, he has no clue what to do about it.

Sometimes, Amory becomes snobbish and arrogant, but in this way, he is merely attempting to conceal his self-doubt. In fact, he truly enjoys interacting with others, making new friends, and discovering novel things.

Actually, there is a simple and lucid explanation for all the flaws in Amory's character, and that is his upbringing. What would one expect from a child who has scarcely seen his father once a year and whose mother was preoccupied either with herself or with her parties, and the only means by which she educated her son was by telling him worldly gossips and fulfilling all his whims?

It is logical to assume that being an "egoist," Amory is incapable of love, but that is not the case. He can love, although his feelings are in most cases not profound but rather intense, often desperate. He falls in love easily and also falls out of it easily. Amory takes love for granted - one should make the most of it once one has fallen in love and simply forget it when it ends.

As you can observe, this character is extremely complex, but what is remarkable about him is that anyone can see themselves in him if they look more closely.

What is Amory's calling in life? This is his major quandary. Throughout the novel, the protagonist changes numerous hobbies and fascinations in an attempt to find the most suitable one. Amory is eager to become famous, regardless of the means, and he is striving to achieve his goal. He does not succeed in the end, but he discovers something far more precious - himself. The entire novel is a long journey of the main character towards the understanding of himself and his own life. There is a remarkable quote about it in the novel: "Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on — I've seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides 'the next thing.' Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he's done. He's a bar on which a thousand things have been hung—glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them."

Amory is a personality from the very outset, there is no denying that. But he has a long way to travel, and at the end of this path, as the title of the last chapter suggests, "The Egotist Becomes a Personage." And here, finding his calling for Amory becomes just a matter of time.

Now, this was a story of Amory Blaine, but the book is not solely about Amory; it is about the entire generation of young people, the Jazz Age generation, whose lives are an endless succession of parties, love affairs, cocktails, gossips about each other, and other forms of amusement. The key word for this generation is "easiness." Regardless of what befalls Amory and his friends, their life remains easy, and they effortlessly forget the events that could bring bitterness into their lives. Sometimes, it seems as if they are living some imaginary lives of their own, where nothing bad can occur, where there is always just fun and laughter. They dwell in their dreams and fantasies about real life rather than in this life itself. They see what they desire to see and deny the rest. What do they live for? None of them knows, and none of them wishes to know.

But one cannot flee from real life forever, and Amory is the first to sense it. It takes numerous sorrowful events to make Amory realize that there is no escape from reality, and sooner or later, the moment will arrive when one has to answer the questions "Who am I?" and "What is my aim in life?" And the sooner one discovers the answer, the better it is for oneself.

Bleh, I really made an effort. I tried SO HARD to develop an affection for this book!

However, in the end, I resorted to skimming approximately the last 1/3 of it. I have a deep love for Fitzgerald’s other literary works.

But this, his very first book, was disappointingly blasé. It lacked a genuine plot and failed to establish any emotional connections.

It was rather vapid and seemed to be centered around selfishness. It brought to my mind books like A Separate Peace or Catcher in the Rye, neither of which I found enjoyable.

After all, life is far too short to waste on boring books!

It's time to move on to more fulfilling reading experiences.

DNF 20%.

Although the narration in this work is quite good, I have to admit that I found the protagonist to be really uninteresting. There was no hint of anything truly compelling or engaging that would make me want to continue reading.

In life, our time is limited, and we should spend it on things that truly capture our attention and interest.

Unfortunately, this particular story failed to do that for me.

Perhaps others may have a different opinion, but for now, I have decided to move on and explore other literary works that might offer a more captivating experience.

After all, there are so many great books out there waiting to be discovered, and I don't want to waste my precious time on something that doesn't resonate with me.

Maybe in the future, I will come across a story with a protagonist who is truly unforgettable and a plot that keeps me on the edge of my seat.

Until then, I will continue my search for that perfect read.

**This Side of Paradise: An In-depth Look**

Introduction
This Side of Paradise is a significant work that offers a profound exploration of the lives and experiences of the characters. It provides a window into a particular era and the mindset of the youth.

Note on the Text
The text is rich in detail and literary devices, making it a captivating read. The language used is vivid and descriptive, allowing the reader to fully immerse in the story.

Select Bibliography
For those interested in delving deeper into the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald and This Side of Paradise, the select bibliography offers a valuable resource. It includes works that analyze the novel, as well as other related literary works.

A Chronology of F. Scott Fitzgerald
The chronology provides a timeline of Fitzgerald's life and career, highlighting the key events and works that shaped his literary journey.

Explanatory Notes
The explanatory notes offer additional context and clarification for some of the more complex or unfamiliar references in the text. They enhance the reader's understanding and appreciation of the novel.


This Side of Paradise is a remarkable work that continues to resonate with readers today. Its themes of love, loss, and the pursuit of happiness are universal and timeless.

“I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all!”

And that's how the novel concludes. The book brought Fitzgerald wealth at the young age of 24. Sometimes, I can't help but wonder what exactly the people in The Roaring Twenties found appealing in it.

It is a manuscript that evolves from a narrative, transitions to pages of poetry to tell the story, then sets out the lines and actions of a stage play to advance the novel,接着讲述那些结局不佳的爱情故事, then presents naive and blustering arguments for socialism (after all, it was 1920, and he had written the novel in the years before, with the Russian Revolution only two years old), and finally ends with a severely nihilistic attitude towards practically everything.

However, if we are in the habit of反复思考 things in our minds, we might write and say a lot of iconoclastic things at 24. The male protagonist, Amory, who to a certain extent seems to be a sketch of Fitzgerald, doesn't seem to truly know himself at the end, in any case. Besides his love affairs with four women, especially Rosalind, the novel failed to enthral or hold my interest.

Yes, there is some beautiful writing, some wonderful metaphors and similes, and a lovely poetic flow to what is otherwise a rather chopped-up narrative. But six years later, when he publishes The Great Gatsby at 30, we witness a much more cohesive and nuanced approach to writing that results in one of the great novels of American literature.

The Beautiful and the Damned was his second novel (1922), Gatsby his third (1926), Tender is the Night his final complete work (1934), and what a tragedy that was, but then, so was Gatsby. The writing in Gatsby is superior to This Side of Paradise in so many ways, yet it was not the bestseller Paradise was. Is that because the partying public didn't like Fitzgerald's criticism of their world in Gatsby?

There were several parts that I enjoyed very much, even though the overall effect on me was rather gray.

This book truly disappointed me.

It is centered around a young man who is not only bored but also extremely boring. He is over-privileged, living a life of luxury and ease without any real challenges. What's more, he is highly self-centered and narcissistic, constantly thinking only of himself and his own desires. His ego is so overblown that it becomes tiresome to read about his actions and thoughts.

The story fails to engage me on any level. There is no real depth or character development, and the plot is rather simplistic. I found myself struggling to get through the book, and by the end, I was left with a sense of dissatisfaction.

Overall, I can only rate this book as 2 stars. It had the potential to be something more, but unfortunately, it fell short in many aspects.

Part 1 - The Portrait of a Writer Struggling in his 20s.

This book vividly showcases a writer in his 20s grappling with the creative process. It is brimming with ideas, vignettes, and poems, interspersed with bursts of frantic energy. However, it fails to coalesce into anything more than a collection of anecdotes from adolescence and young adulthood. In this regard, it reminds me of a novel I attempted to write at 19 and 20, which I ultimately had to abandon. That novel, like this one, seemed to exist more as potential, ideas, and fragments rather than a coherent whole.

In some ways, the book bears a resemblance to Natsume Soseki’s “Sorekara” and perhaps a little bit of “Catcher in the Rye.” Those books also centered around troubled youths. The difference lies in the fact that those novels were completed works, finished entities.

In our early 20s, we are never as clever as we envision ourselves to be... and indeed, we lack that elusive quality called “depth.” The book often strives for cleverness but falls short of achieving true depth, certainly not in the way a book like “Tender is the Night” does. Nevertheless, you can discern the elements that would later evolve into the more mature F. Scott Fitzgerald. For this reason, this book could be beneficial for aspiring writers hoping to gain insights into how writers develop from one book to the next.

It might also serve as a cautionary tale for young, aspiring writers: Be patient, young man. Be patient.

Interlude - A Peak into a World I Might Never Understand.

The book appears to be very much a product of its time. What was it like to be part of the east coast upper class boarding school class of 1920? To understand the significant differences between being a Yale, Princeton, or Harvard man? I may never know... and the book does not offer a great introduction to this culture.

There are numerous writers and philosophers discussed in this book. The novel is almost a literary thesis in itself. If it is, it presupposes your familiarity with the authors and philosophers being discussed. I have a sense that time has not been kind to most (but not all) of the authors mentioned by Amory.

A novel is an inappropriate place for philosophy unless it has been精心策划 - see “Sophie’s World” and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” It is advisable to avoid novelizing a philosophy, especially if you are in your early 20s.

A very young man grapples with socialism. A very young man contends with honor and heroism. A very young man has difficulty connecting with his family and friends and thus invests mystical faith in something called “the race” - a concept that sounds foreign to my ears 100 years later. (Is it a specific race? The human race?) Every young man feels that his generation has a more legitimate grievance than the previous one, that true heroism has vanished or that some great moral wrong has been committed. The world is impure, they discover - not realizing that this is not a novel discovery. Every young person struggles with ways to earn distinction and win a mating partner. But one hundred years later, these gripes seem trivial, frivolous, and hopelessly outdated. If anything, they serve to remind us that when we look back at our own youths, we will find many of our daily problems to be insignificant.

This “novel” is then an artifact of the reckless yearnings of youth... the angst and despair of the 1910s and then 1920s... to finish a novel! To finish! To be done! But the book is not truly finished. It is, like Amory Blaine, a work in progress.

Part 3 - The Novel that Never Was.

Typically, a young novelist is hindered by a lack of experience. One writing teacher told me that no good stories ever emerged from a university. What I believe he meant was that the truly interesting aspects of life lie outside the confines of comfortable institutions. He could have equally said that no good stories came out of a human resources department, insurance back offices, or the mailroom of a company.

And yet, there are interesting elements in this book - a young man goes off to war (albeit briefly). A young man attempts to make his way in the advertising business. I couldn't help but think that the scene before Amory departs for war was truly wonderful, but it could have been even better. Two young people, on the verge of going off to war, contemplating how their lives are about to change.

War, poverty, the specter of death - these are the kinds of experiences that force people out of their abstract perspectives on the world. Abstractions about “race”, “justice”, and “honor” always seem more meaningful to me when there are tangible stakes. The only path to the universal is through the particular.

The only way to make me care about Amory’s ideas is to make me care about Amory, his upper class east coast friends, and truly immerse me in the world he inhabits.

The great tragedy of the novel is that Amory Blaine has yet to truly live. Perhaps I should say - the novel has a personality, but no personage.

Amory Blaine was always a self-centered and unempathetic child. As he grew up, he developed into a refined egotist, attending Princeton Academy. However, in the end, he always found himself a victim of love.

I am deeply in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing. Ever since I read The Great Gatsby, I have been captivated. I would do just about anything to be able to write as beautifully as he does.

His descriptions and the flow of his words are executed with such elegance that they manage to draw attention away from what might otherwise be a dull and inactive story.

In my previous status update, I proclaimed this book to be amazing. But literally, right after that page, it gradually declined into something rather mediocre.

If I had stopped reading at page 224, I would probably have given this book five stars. However, those last forty pages were completely incomprehensible to me. Maybe it was because I was tired and eager to finish it last night, but it just didn't make any sense. The ending was a letdown, and I almost wish he had ended it on page 224, as that part was truly beautiful.

Around page 157, the book finally picks up momentum and sweeps you into a heart-wrenching tale of love and the tragedy of lost love. After page 224, it remains interesting, but there's something strange about it. Okay, up until page 234 was still tolerable, but then, it became goddamn confusing.

Fitzgerald starts to delve too deeply into politics, and I couldn't make heads or tails of it. I was trying to read very attentively, hoping to understand what the heck they were talking about.

Anyway, the first 150 pages are rather slow, and at times, admittedly, confusing. But it is still a great book. Some of the things Amory and his friends discuss can be perfectly related to what is happening in modern times and culture. Even though it was written in the early 1920s, so much of it can be connected to the events and issues of today.

It's a story that teaches us that being selfish and an egotist leads nowhere in life and love. You may know and admire yourself very well, but that is all. That is all you will ever know.

This is perhaps one of the most poignant stories for a twenty-something-year-old to peruse during a recession.

Particularly if they have been compelled to搁置 their dreams and are currently in the throes of seeking something rather ordinary just to eke out a living.

It is truly astonishing how relevant it remains even decades after the advent of the Jazz Age.

The book zeroes in on the collision between the old Victorian ideals and the emerging youth liberalization that followed the First World War.

Today, we find ourselves equally adrift.

The wars we have been engaged in and the recession we are weathering will reconfigure our nation, much like it was redefined after the turmoil of WWI.

The query is: how?

Amory is ensnared right in the epicenter of this clash between Victorian conservatism and youth liberalization.

It is incumbent upon him and the other young men and women of the era to either forge the new new or cleave to the old.

I envision the character of Amory Blaine when I look at all my college friends who had aspirations of what their lives would be like post-graduation, only to have those dreams shattered on the jagged rocks of this recession.

Let us all fervently pray that in the end, we do not meet the same fate as Fitzgerald, who modeled his character Amory after himself.

Let us hope that we do not tread the path of Amory and are able to reclaim our aspirations when circumstances ameliorate.

Otherwise, we might drown our hopelessness in bottles of alcohol until it claims us, just like the renowned U.S. author who penned this book.

\\n  ​\\"You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.\\"\\n

This semester, I have embarked on a self-driven challenge. The goal is to read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels, and if time permits, a few short story collections as well. I have set a daily quota of exactly ten pages of Fitzgerald's works. This marks my first reading endeavor of the year, and so far, this idea seems to be progressing smoothly.

I had read The Great Gatsby in middle school, but I can truthfully say that this is the first of his books that I have truly delved into and understood. The author's ability to capture the full spectrum of human emotions, both the beautiful and the ugly, is truly remarkable. His use of word imagery is almost unrivaled, and I find myself completely adoring his writing style.

However, the main issue I had with this book was its inconsistency. At one moment, I would be completely engrossed, devouring the pages with rapt attention. But the next moment, I would be rolling my eyes at yet another philosophical rant. Honestly, it was quite a rollercoaster of emotions. One page, I would be singing the praises of a flawless beauty, as if accompanied by a choir belting out harmonious melodies. And the next page, I would be facepalming so forcefully that my friends began to worry it was a form of self-mutilation. The same went for my feelings towards Amory, the main character. I loved him, then I hated him, then I loved him again, and then I hated him once more.

Overall, this book very much reads like a debut novel, with its share of struggles and yet, a great deal of promise all wrapped up neatly in a bow. It has its flaws, but it also has moments of pure brilliance that make it a worthwhile read.

When I first delved into F. Scott Fitzgerald's debut novel This Side of Paradise (it was somewhere in my late teens or early twenties; I can't recall precisely), I was younger than the author himself was when he penned it.

Rereading it approximately fifteen years later, I find myself a decade older than he was when the novel was published, and yet I'm no less astounded by the brilliant force of his writing.

This book's composition exquisitely emulates its content. Trailing its protagonist, Amory Blaine, from adolescence to young adulthood, it's all about the birth of consciousness. The narrative might not be as masterfully constructed as, for instance, The Great Gatsby or even The Beautiful and Damned / Tender is the Night, but Fitzgerald's perspective and style present themselves in full form. His unique formal adventurousness is already on full show: the novel incorporates poems, epistolary chapters, and even a large section written as a stage play. Fitzgerald's prose—particularly in the final thirty or so pages—skillfully balances heightened poetic language with the kind of hyperreal clarity often ascribed to his contemporary and friend Ernest Hemingway.

One of the novel's most remarkable features is its convincing portrayal of Blaine's evolving views on literature, religion, politics, sex, and education. I especially adore the long debates between Blaine and his classmates regarding the books they're reading and the ideologies they're contemplating, which so compellingly echo the dialogue of very young and very self-serious intellectuals-in-training.

The story doesn't so much map out a neat progression from "asleep" to "awake" as it observes a protagonist's faulty assumptions gradually crumbling under the weight of reality. At the conclusion of the novel, Blaine appears to have developed some sort of class consciousness, but he also acknowledges his own deep resentments towards people living in poverty. He's a mass of contradictions and confusions, which renders him all the more real.

I was a firm believer, basing my thoughts on conspiracy theories and TikTok videos. So, I really didn't know what that said about me. I firmly believed that Fitzgerald had stolen "The Great Gatsby" from Zelda. However, after reading this and learning its story, I'm no longer so sure.

It reads exactly like "TGG", and knowing that it is based on a sort of autobiography he wrote about himself during his school days and was rejected from publishing makes me question things quite a bit.

All in all, I enjoyed this a lot. Reading about Amory, which I think is actually just Fitzgerald basing a character off of himself, and his narcissistic personality and his airs of grandeur was really, really funny and at times sad to me.

I didn't expect to like this as much as I did, but I'm very glad I decided at some point to consider myself an intellectual and purchase this book at the second-hand book store. It has opened my eyes to a different side of Fitzgerald's work and made me reevaluate my previous beliefs.

I look forward to exploring more of his writings and seeing how they compare to this one. Maybe there are more surprises in store for me.