This Side of Paradise

by

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Youth, Innocence, and Coming of Age Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Youth, Innocence, and Coming of Age Theme Icon
Friendship and Masculinity Theme Icon
War, Modern Life, and Generations Theme Icon
Money and Class Theme Icon
Love and Sexuality Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in This Side of Paradise, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Youth, Innocence, and Coming of Age Theme Icon

This Side of Paradise is primarily a coming-of-age novel, or bildungsroman: it traces Amory Blaine’s development from childhood to adulthood, losing his youth and innocence along the way. Despite depicting youthhood nostalgically and romantically, the novel does not glorify youth in and of itself: rather, it suggests that losing one’s innocence is necessary for self-knowledge and responsibility to others. In short, it suggests that many virtues are gained in the process of coming of age.

The virtues of becoming an adult are perhaps best exemplified by Monsignor Darcy’s distinction between “personality” and “personage”: “personality” refers to a person who is a constant, unchanging entity, and “personage” refers to a person who gathers experiences and learns from them. As Amory grows up throughout the novel, he becomes increasingly reflective and self-aware, and he learns to accept his flaws rather than dislike himself for them. He also dramatically shifts his attitudes regarding other people: while at the beginning of the novel he is selfish and cruel, by the end of the novel he recognizes and regrets his cruelty and wants to be a person other people rely on. Amory also begins the novel relishing his youth and believing his years at Princeton and his romance with Isabelle Borgé are the high points of his life. After the war, feeling that his innocence has been lost and his youth abandoned, Amory feels despondent and behaves self-destructively. But by the end of the novel, while Amory still feels nostalgia for his lost youth, he knows that he does not ultimately want to return to a state of innocence: rather, he recognizes and celebrates the pleasure of maturing, realizing that he can still cherish the good times he’s had while also leaving behind this youthful period of his life. There is a sense, therefore, that he has become a “personage,” or at least is in the process of becoming one—that is, he accepts that reaching maturity means accepting a certain sense of continued development, change, and growth.

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Youth, Innocence, and Coming of Age ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Youth, Innocence, and Coming of Age appears in each part of This Side of Paradise. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Youth, Innocence, and Coming of Age Quotes in This Side of Paradise

Below you will find the important quotes in This Side of Paradise related to the theme of Youth, Innocence, and Coming of Age.
Book 1, Chapter 1: Amory, Son of Beatrice Quotes

Vanity, tempered with self-suspicion if not self-knowledge, a sense of people as automatons to his will, a desire to “pass” as many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world. (… ) With this background did Amory drift into adolescence.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine
Page Number: 17-18
Explanation and Analysis:

Amory’s secret ideal had all the slicker qualifications, but, in addition, courage and tremendous brains and talents—also Amory conceded him a bizarre streak that was quite irreconcilable to the slicker proper.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine
Related Symbols: The Slicker
Page Number: 32-33
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 2: Spires and Gargoyles Quotes

Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest time of his life. His ideas were in tune with life as he found it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy and enjoy a dozen new-found friendships through the April afternoons.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine
Page Number: 67
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 3: The Egotist Considers Quotes

He became aware that he had not an ounce of real affection for Isabelle, but her coldness piqued him. He wanted to kiss her, kiss her a lot, because then he knew he could leave in the morning and not care. On the contrary, if he didn’t kiss her, it would worry him… It would interfere vaguely with his idea of himself as a conqueror.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Isabelle Borgé
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 84
Explanation and Analysis:

“A personality is what you thought you were, what this Kerry and Sloane you tell me of evidently are. 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.”

Related Characters: Monsignor Darcy (speaker), Amory Blaine, Kerry Holiday, Fred Sloane
Page Number: 95-96
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 4: Narcissus Off Duty Quotes

The intense power Amory felt later in Burne Holiday differed from the admiration he had had for Humbird[…]. Amory was struck by Burne’s intense earnestness[…]. Burne stood vaguely for a land Amory hoped he was drifting toward—and it was almost time that land was in sight.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Burne Holiday, Dick Humbird
Related Symbols: The Slicker
Page Number: 112
Explanation and Analysis:

“You know,” whispered Tom, “what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years. (…) And what we leave here is more than one class; it’s the whole heritage of youth. We’re just one generation—we’re breaking all the links that seemed to bind us here to top-booted and high-stocked generations.”

Related Characters: Thomas Parke D’Invilliers (Tom) (speaker), Amory Blaine
Page Number: 140
Explanation and Analysis:
Interlude: May, 1917 – February, 1919 Quotes

This is the end of one thing: for better or worse you will never again be quite the Amory Blaine that I knew, never again will we meet as we have met, because your generation is growing hard, much harder than mine ever grew, nourished as they were in the stuff of the nineties.

Related Characters: Monsignor Darcy (speaker), Amory Blaine
Page Number: 145
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 1: The Débutante Quotes

SHE: Well, Amory, you don’t mind—do you? When I meet a man that doesn’t bore me to death after two weeks, perhaps it’ll be different.

HE: Odd, you have the same point of view on men that I have on women.

SHE: I’m not really feminine, you know—in my mind.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker), Rosalind Connage (speaker)
Page Number: 159
Explanation and Analysis:

All life was transmitted into terms of their love, all experience, all desires, all ambitions, were nullified—their senses of humor crawled into corners to sleep; their former love affairs seemed faintly laughable and scarcely regretted juvenalia. For the second time in his life Amory had a complete bouleversement and was hurrying into line with his generation.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Rosalind Connage
Page Number: 171
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 2: Experiments in Convalescence Quotes

“ ‘S a mental was’e,’ he insisted with his owl-like wisdom. “Two years my life spent inalleshual vacuity. Los’ idealism, got be physcal anmal,” he shook his fist expressively at Old King Cole, “got be Prussian ‘bout ev’thing, women ‘specially. Use’ be straight ‘bout women college. Now don’givadam. (…) Seek pleasure where find it for to-morrow die. ‘At’s philosophy for me now on.”

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker), Rosalind Connage
Page Number: 183
Explanation and Analysis:

Amory had loved Rosalind as he would never love another living person. She had taken the first flush of his youth and brought from his unplumbed depths tenderness that had surprised him, gentleness and unselfishness that he had never given to another creature. He had later love-affairs, but of a different sort: in those he went back to that, perhaps, more typical frame of mind, in which the girl became the mirror of a mood in him.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Rosalind Connage, Eleanor Savage, Clara Page
Page Number: 191-2
Explanation and Analysis:

“[The war] certainly ruined the old backgrounds, sort of killed individualism out of our generation. (…) I’m not sure it didn’t kill it out of the whole world. Oh, Lord, what a pleasure it used to be to dream I might be a really great dictator or writer or religious or political leader—and now even Leonardo da Vinci or Lorenzo de Medici couldn’t be a real old-fashioned bolt in the world. Life is too huge and complex. The world is so overgrown that it can’t lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger—”

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker), Thomas Parke D’Invilliers (Tom)
Page Number: 196
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 4: The Supercilious Sacrifice Quotes

Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Alec Connage, Jill Wayne
Page Number: 228
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 5: The Egotist Becomes a Personage Quotes

Q.—What would be the test of corruption?

A.—Becoming really insincere—calling myself “not such a bad fellow,” thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envy the delights of losing it. 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. (…) I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker)
Page Number: 238
Explanation and Analysis:

Life opened up in one of its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: “Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.”

On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Monsignor Darcy, Stephen Blaine
Page Number: 245
Explanation and Analysis:

“Well,” said Amory, “I simply state that I’m a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation—with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones.”

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker), Mr. Ferrenby
Page Number: 256
Explanation and Analysis:

And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed…

He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.

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

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker)
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 260
Explanation and Analysis: