Innovative style
For his first novel, Fitzgerald used as his literary templates H. G. Wells' 1909 realist work Tono-Bungay and Sir Compton Mackenzie's 1913 novel Sinister Street,[108] which chronicles a young college student's coming of age at Oxford University.[109]
Although Fitzgerald imitated the plot of these two novels, his debut work differed due to its experimental style.[110] He discarded the stodgy narrative technique of most novels and instead unspooled the plot in the form of textual fragments, letters, and poetry intermingled together,[111] including a passage written in a stream-of-consciousness style. This was largely a result of Fitzgerald's cobbling The Romantic Egotist, his earlier attempt at a novel, together with assorted short stories and poems that he had composed but never published.[112]
This atonal blend of different fictive elements prompted cultural elites to celebrate the young Fitzgerald as a literary trailblazer whose work modernized a staid literature which had lagged "as far behind modern habits as behind modern history."[113] Dorothy Parker later remarked that "This Side of Paradise may not seem like much now, but in 1920 it was considered an experimental novel; it cut new ground."[114]
Prose anomalies
More so than most contemporary writers of his era, Fitzgerald's authorial voice evolved and matured over time,[115] and each of his novels represented a discernible progression in literary quality.[116] Although he was eventually regarded as possessing "the best narrative gift of the century," this narrative gift was not perceived as immediately evident in This Side of Paradise.[117] Believing that prose had a basis in lyric verse,[118] Fitzgerald initially crafted his sentences entirely by ear and, consequently, This Side of Paradise contains numerous malapropisms and descriptive non sequiturs which irritated readers and reviewers.[119] Reflecting upon these copious defects, critic Edmund Wilson later argued that Fitzgerald's debut work had "almost every fault and deficiency that a novel can possibly have".[120]
Thematic content
I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920)[121]
The underlying themes of narcissism in the novel have been examined in a variety of scholarly essays.[122] Scholar Saori Tanaka's essay on narcissism argues that "Amory comes to know himself through Beatrice and his four lovers, which are like five sheets of glass. They are his reflectors...reflecting his narcissism and the inner side."[123]
The first three women in the book allow Amory to dream in a narcissistic way. After participating in the war and losing his financial foundation, the last two women he meets, Rosalind and Eleanor, "make him not dream but awake" in postwar America.[124] "With Beatrice and Isabelle, Amory activates the grandiose self," Tanaka states, "with Clara and Rosalind, he restricts narcissism, and with Eleanor, he gains a realistic conception of the self."[125]
Others have analyzed feminist themes in the work. Scholar Andrew Riccardo views several characters to be feminist templates.[126] Eleanor's character serves as a "love interest, therapeutic friend, and conversational other".[127] Highly educated in discussing poetry and philosophy, "Eleanor not only posits her desires in juxtaposition to the lingering expectations of women in her day but also serves as soothsayer to the demands which would be placed on females".[127]
