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This side of Paradise :broken_heart: by F. Scott Fitzgerald - Coggle…
This side of Paradise :broken_heart: by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Themes :frame_with_picture:
Love
:sparkling_heart: is also very present in the novel. Amory has
many love affairs
throughout the story even if
they all end up badly.
Disappointment
:frowning_face: is one of the many emotions Amory feels frequently. Throughout the story, disappointment is present. From not being able to find a girlfriend in his early days to loosing Rosalind.
This shapes Amory and makes him detached from Earth
so he doesn't have to feel.
Youth
:hatching_chick: and growing up are the
main themes of the novel.
We can see the progression of Amory from being a child sent to boarding school to being a grown man trying to find himself and understand the world around him
Money
:dollar: is a recurring theme in the story . Amory goes from being extremely rich to being extremely poor. This emphasizes the situation at the time the novel was written, where money was hard to make and easy to loose. And where, being borne with money did not mean having money forever.
Death
:skull_and_crossbones: is very present in
This Side of Paradise
. Many people close to Amory die (some tragically), it shows how this
generation has been impacted by wars and economical hardships
, and how they are trying to cope with it.
Characters :silhouettes:
Monsignor Darcy
:mens: is an
influential figure
for Amory whom he considers like a son. He joins the clergy after his love affair with Beatrice Blaine. He
dies when Amory is about 25.
Beatrice Blaine
:womens: is the
mother of Amory
. She is an eccentric who travels a lot and is not very authoritative with Amory. She has many health problems and
dies when Amory is about 22
, leaving him very little money
Dick Humbird
:mens: is
Amory's friend
. Amory admires him because
he is everything that he considers important
even if his money is new. Dies in a car crash returning to Princeton after a party.
Rosalind Connage
:womens: is the
sister of Alec
Connage who is a good friend of Amory (they met in Princeton). She has a
passionate love affair
with Amory, but leaves him because of his lack of money. Their love affair was Amory's love of his life. She marries another rich man soon after they leave each other.
Kerry Holiday
:mens: is
Amory's friend
form Princeton. He volunteers to go fight in France,
he is killed not long after.
Amory Blaine
:mens: is the
main character
of the novel. He is from a rich American family and was raised by his mother Beatrice. He is
handsome and a little egocentric
. Amory, like all well to-do American, went to university at
Princeton
. There he tries to achieve his
literary ambitions and social expectations
. He has many adventures with women, one especially painful with
Rosalind
that leaves him because he doesn't have any money. In the end, Amory has gained some
self-knowledge
even if that cost him some of his friends and all of his money.
Alec Connage
:mens: is
Amory's friend from Princeton
and
brother of Rosalind Connage
. Amory takes the blame in Atlantic city when Alec is accused of moving a girl across state line with "bad" intentions, violating the Mann Act. They fell out after that.
Clara Page
:womens: is
Darcy's cousin
.
Amory falls in love
with her when visiting her house in Philadelphia, but she claims that
she could never fall in love again after her husband's death.
Isabelle Borge
:womens: is
Amory's first love affair
. It ends when they get into an argument and realize they
like themselves better than each other.
Eleanor Savage
:womens: is a
young educated woman
that Amory meets in Maryland. She falls in love with him but the memories of Rosalind is too close to him.
They understand each other very well.
Their romance stops after
Eleanor tries killing herself with galloping off a cliff
(she jumps in time and doesn't die).
Quotes :left_speech_bubble:
“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again” (195)
“composed largely of flowers that, when closely inspected, appeared moth-eaten, and of ants that endlessly traversed blades of grass, [the scene] was always disillusioning” (211)
“It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being” (12).
“’ No, I’m romantic- a sentimental person thinks things will last- a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t. Sentiment is emotional’”
“For the first time in his life he rather longed for death to roll over his generation, obliterating their petty fevers and struggles and exultations…Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of disillusion” (184).
Writing Techniques :pen:
Figurative language :question:
Imagery
:sunflower: is used a lot by Fitzgerald with a focus on nature and how it represents Amory's cycle of romance. From summer to winter, there are many descriptions of the environment in which Amory is living. One example of how natural imagery is used as a symbol is with Eleanor because their love is described as a 'summer love' which much like summer is a preparation for the hardships of winter and falls short of expectations.
Stream of consiciouness
:thought_balloon: is used on page 226-228. It is a literary style in which a
character's thoughts, feelings, and reactions are depicted in a continuous flow uninterrupted
by objective description or conventional dialogue.
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust
are among its notable early exponents. Fitzgerald uses it to show how Amory's confused and
full of doubts.
Simile
:recycle: are used often by the
author to make his writing more relatable and make the characterization of Amory and other characters clearer.
He also uses simple simile words such as "like" and "as" instead of using complicated formulas.
Structure :house:
Fitzgerald uses an
Episodic Structure
:crossed_swords: in the novel which allows for more characters and settings. Instead of focusing on certain characters and few settings, he focuses
on one character and many different loosely connected events
(the time that he sees a ghost and when he goes to lunch with a friend of Monsignor) throughout many years (from Amory's youth until he is about 25).
The author uses different structures like in the first chapter of the second book where he uses
script format
. :scroll: Additionally, he divides the
book into 3 parts
, the first book which represents Amory's adolescence, the interlude which represents his time in the army and the second book which represents his adulthood.
Additional Sources
:newspaper:
https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/paradise/
https://thissideofparadisefitzgerald.weebly.com/quotation-analysis.html