This Side of Paradise: Analysis of Major Characters
"This Side of Paradise" is a novel that explores the journey of self-discovery for its protagonist, Amory Blaine, a young man from a once-prominent Midwestern family facing financial decline. The narrative follows Amory through various life stages, including his time at a preparatory school, Princeton University, service in the Army, and the beginning of his adult life in New York City. He is portrayed as an idealistic and charming individual, grappling with notions of courage, honor, and identity, as he often seeks approval from those he admires.
Key characters in the novel include Beatrice O'Hara Blaine, Amory's theatrical mother, whose influence shapes his early years but leaves him emotionally detached from her later in life. Thayer Darcy, a wise monsignor, serves as a father figure for Amory, guiding him through moral complexities. Amory's relationships with friends like Thomas Parke D'Invilliers, the literary classmate, and the enchanting Rosalind Connage, who ultimately prioritizes social status over love, highlight the complexities of youth, romance, and societal expectations. Other notable figures include the socially conscious Kerry and Burne Holiday, and the impulsive Eleanor Savage, each contributing to Amory's evolving understanding of self and the world around him. Together, these characters create a rich tapestry that reflects the struggles and aspirations of a generation during the early 20th century.
This Side of Paradise: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
First published: 1920
Genre: Novel
Locale: New York City, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Maryland, and Minneapolis
Plot: Fiction of manners
Time: 1896–1919
Amory Blaine, a boy born in the Midwest to a prominent family in the process of losing its fortune. He is a pampered, privileged young boy who embarks on a quest for self-discovery that covers his years at preparatory school, at Princeton University, in the Army, and beginning a life as an adult as he pursues a career in New York. He arrives in the East full of a kind of idealistic innocence, with untested assumptions about courage, honor, duty, and a man's place in the world, but his natural charm, earnestness, amiability, and obvious intelligence enable him to progress toward a firmer understanding of his essential nature. He is almost six feet tall as he enters Princeton, with light hair and penetrating green eyes. He is strikingly but not conventionally handsome, with a kind of slender athleticism to his carriage. Often intoxicated with the splendor of his youth and intensely conscious of his reactions to everything, he is fond of outrageous gestures and desperately concerned about his appearance and status in the eyes of those whom he admires and hopes to equal or emulate. He correctly sees himself as a “romantic egotist,” and his attitude toward the world—particularly toward women—has been shaped heavily by his reading, which has tended toward nineteenth century writers with rebellious and ultraromantic philosophies. His inclinations toward social equality and his sensitivity toward the people whom he likes rescue him from his tendencies to be a prototypical snob with a vastly inflated estimate of his own self-worth.
Beatrice O'Hara Blaine, Amory's mother, an extremely theatrical, self-dramatizing woman of exceptional beauty, almost constantly affected in manner, with no sense of monetary value and no real fundamental understanding of life. She lives as she wishes, with few responsibilities and a casually distant relationship to her husband. She is primarily responsible for rearing Amory through his childhood and for almost sealing him in the mold of a precious young prig fascinated with his own glory. She and Amory come to understand each other very well, but he is hardly affected by the news of her death during World War I.
Thayer Darcy, a Catholic monsignor, forty-four years old when Amory meets him, robust, and somewhat stout. He creates an impressive figure in his religious regalia but is much more striking in terms of his warmth, wisdom, and abiding religious faith, which he has won through a test of conscience and experience. He is almost perfect as the surrogate father whom Amory needs: appreciative of Amory's wit, guiding him toward sound moral and aesthetic precepts, and showing him gradually the range and depth of life that Amory has not seen yet. He is encouraging, patient, nonjudgmental, incisive, and philosophic, a constant pleasure to know. He gives Amory a sense of his Irish/Celtic heritage, supports his quest, and accepts his egotism. He is a model on which Amory can pattern himself. His death at the book's end marks the true beginning of Amory's adulthood.
Thomas Parke D'Invilliers, one of Amory's classmates at Princeton, who seems to be eccentrically out of touch with important social customs. He is stoop shouldered and has pale blue eyes. Amory eventually discovers that Thomas is genuinely literary and fundamentally traditional in outlook. He remains one of Amory's best friends and is able to discuss literature with passion and without affectation. He is drawn from the poet John Peale Bishop.
Kerry Holiday and Burne Holiday, brothers attending Princeton, housemates of Amory during his freshman year. Kerry, good-natured, easygoing, and completely natural, volunteers for and dies in World War I. Burne seems to emerge during his junior year, when he reaches a position of socialism and pacificism and argues his reformist politics with passion, conviction, and an impressive, lucid logic.
Alec Connage, another of Amory's friends at Princeton, basically decent but essentially nondescript. He lacks the special essence of Amory's closest friends.
Rosalind Connage, Alec's sister, the great love of Amory's life, with “glorious yellow hair,” an “eternal kissable mouth, small, slightly sensual,” and “an unimpeachable skin with two spots of vanishing color.” She is physically stunning and mentally overwhelming. She is self-confident and self-possessed, and her offhand, casually witty personality tends to distract people from her perceptive view of the world. She has a gift for romantic banter (possibly based on that of Zelda Sayre), and she and Amory spend five weeks in an all-consuming relationship. Then, ruled by social expectations, she breaks off the affair and marries for money, comfort, and what she refers to as “background.” In spite of her appeal, she exhibits tendencies to be vain, lazy, and selfish, tendencies of which Amory is not aware, caught up as he is in blind ardor.
Isabelle Borgé, Amory's first love, a girl from his hometown.
Clara Page, Amory's distant cousin, with whom he falls in love briefly. A beautiful, self-composed, and mature woman, she is both regal in demeanor and democratic in attitude, too advanced for Amory.
Eleanor Savage, an impetuous eighteen-year-old with whom Amory has a brief summer romance shortly after his break with Rosalind. She is a reckless romantic, with a “gorgeous clarity of mind” and a self-destructive streak that recalls some of Edgar Allan Poe's more exotic heroines. Her incipient madness and her atheism attract and frighten Amory.