This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

In both style and form, This Side of Paradise is Fitzgerald’s novel of apprenticeship because he is clearly striving to demonstrate both his technical virtuosity and his seriousness in purpose (Kahn 39). To display his mastery of literary form, Fitzgerald creates a novel that is a pastiche of poems, letters, lists, and even a play in three acts embedded within a prose narrative (123). At some times the novel seems movie or film-like. This is illustrated …

…good-looking place, rather like himself. His education does little to his essential self but his spiritual education does even less. Even with one of his most important influences being a priest, by the end of the novel, he believes “there was a certain intrinsic lack in those to whom orthodox religion was necessary” (Fitzgerald 258). The ideal he pursues has nothing to do with the church. Amory makes of its pursuit his own sort of religion.