F. Scott Fitzgerald is best known for capturing the spirit of America in beautifully dreamy, cynical prose. The general themes in his writing seem straightforward enough--the American Dream, the decadence and wealth that plagued his generation, and the fatal nobility of idealists like Gatsby. But the quality that makes the content of his work so compelling is his honest investigation of the obscure and faulty morality of feelings. From novels like This Side of Paradise to short stories like “Babylon Revisited,” Fitzgerald negotiates the murky world of honest and dishonest emotions in his characters, but also in himself.

The foundation of all of Fitzgerald’s work lies in his first novel, This Side of Paradise. Written as a kind of self-conscious autobiography at the age of 23, This Side of Paradise is rich with the unformed and half-formed elements of the young and romantic egotist that was Fitzgerald, and effectively serves as a mirror for his life and the world that he lived in. The novel sets the tone for the rest of his writing career, with its tumult of vitality and feelings, or lack thereof. As Weller Embler put it, “It was in his first book, This Side of Paradise, that Fitzgerald began to look for the ‘fundamental’ Amory, and from then on through all his stories and novels the search continues. (Embler)”

In This Side of Paradise, Amory acts as Fitzgerald’s surrogate, living in the mire of his generation--a mire where emotions were inconsequential playthings, dictated by what figure someone wanted to cut, what modes of conduct they wanted to act out, and what they wanted to imitate in their fickle admiration of their peers. While Fitzgerald portrays Amory as a sensitive, artistic character among his crude peers, he does not shy away from also portraying the emotional conflicts and absurdities of his pseudo-self.

In the instance of the “supercilious sacrifice,” Amory does the right thing for all the wrong reasons. “It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power… Alec would secretly hate him for having done so much for him… Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious (p. 182, Ftizgerald, This Side of Paradise).” Amory can see and name his actions for what they are, but beyond that he does not engage any further with the notion. Similarly, in his relationship with Isabelle, “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 (p. 68).” Amory has a vague sense of self-awareness, but it falls to the side of the road in the face of his ideas of social convention and fashion.

Amory is filled with thoughtless bursts of virtue and vice, frequently at the same time. They dictate his actions in the context of his undergraduate and decadent life, which is also the only context that Amory can see. Towards the end of the novel, Amory begins to recognise the poor and socially low--but only because he is finally one of them--and he only embraces the idea of a social revolution because it means he has the chance of landing on top. In many ways, one could disregard Amory--and the young Fitzgerald--as a flighty and unreliable thoroughbred with nothing to keep him in check. But Amory’s faulty character is not entirely his own fault, because he lacks one of the essential tools that is necessary for personal development.

There is no real or meaningful talking, no community, among the young bachelors and debutantes in This Side of Paradise--“talking of every side of life with an air half of earnestness, half of mockery, yet with a furtive excitement that Amory considered stood for a real moral let-down (p.43).” The only community lies in the shared posturing of maturity, morals, and the experience of the “vast juvenile intrigue” of New York and Chicago (p. 42-43). This is critical in Amory’s lack of emotional maturity, in part because the expectations around him, but more significantly because he never gets the chance to talk seriously about feelings, and certainly not about his own. ‘“Tell me about yourself. What do you feel” meant “Tell me about myself. What do I feel?” (Shain)’ Assuming that dialogue and community are indeed necessary for self-realisation and emotional processing, it is clear that Amory has neither of these things. “Oh, let’s go in,” she interrupted, “if you want to analyse. Let’s not talk about it (p. 44).”

As a consequence, Amory is incapable of discerning his honest emotions from his dishonest ones. He cannot distinguish between the things that he, himself, cares about from the things induced by society that he thinks he cares about. In fact, the idea of that discrepancy seems to never even occur to him within the novel. Amory’s internal state is a weak and unformed thing, roused only by the occasional romance and offence. It cannot stand on its own, and leans heavily on the crutch of what his peers think of him and what he thinks of them. Amory acts as though he has a good grasp of his emotions and ideals--and oftentimes he may think that he does--and so he acts off of them, but there is hardly anything inside of him that is able to be grasped. ‘“I was born one,” Amory murmured. “I’m a cynical idealist.” He paused and wondered if that meant anything (p. 63).’ There is no fundamental Amory on this side of paradise, and perhaps there never will be.

As Amory reflects the life of the young Fitzgerald, Charlie in “Babylon Revisited” reflects the life of the older Fitzgerald. It is not difficult to imagine that Charlie is an older, more experienced version of Amory, and Fitzgerald’s search for the fundamental Amory continues. Charlie is of the same breed as Amory, with the same fast-paced and decadent background. However, unlike the young Amory, Charlie has been broken and bent out of shape by the harsher realities of life, and he can only reminisce about the times when he could run wild. Charlie is handicapped by his responsibilities as an adult and a father, but also by the remorseless absolute of the past.

Charlie has a more defined emotional code than Amory, and a better sense of propriety, but he is still without a defined self--his life is dictated by present crises and past mistakes, and the conflicts that arise from their juxtaposition. One side of Charlie seems to be a responsible businessman who cares for his daughter, but the other side is a man who still struggles with alcoholism and the trail of damage he has left in his wake. Whoever the real Charlie is, he is lost somewhere between his old self and his new self, and he is unknown to both himself and the reader.

Charlie asks after his old drinking comrades and continues to take one drink a day, despite his sole purpose in Paris being to try to appease the hatred Marion has for him and his past. “Things have changed now”--he hesitated and then continued more forcibly--”changed radically with me (p. 219, Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited and Other Stories).” Charlie professes a complete turnabout in character, from an extravagant drunk to a trustworthy father, in the short span of a year and a half, which is difficult to believe. Even his advocacy for the custody of Honoria seems dubious, ”wanting only the tangible, visible child (p. 224).” This is an ambiguous phrase in its simplicity--Charlie certainly loves his daughter with well-intentioned fatherly love, but his motive might just as well be wanting to reassure and console himself over his wife’s death. Charlie tries to do all the right things for all the right reasons, but he cannot do that without the taint of his past choices.

The reader sympathises with Charlie’s predicament, certainly, but trusting him and his motives is a different matter. In fact, on a larger scale, the reader isn’t lead to trust any of Fitzgerald’s characters, whether Charlie or Amory or even Carraway. All of the characters are suspect as Fitzgerald lays them bare. But in doing so, Fitzgerald lays himself bare as well. There is a great irony in the fact that Amory’s primary identity seems to lie in his lack of one. Fitzgerald is well aware of the irony of Amory’s failings in character, which suggests an irony in the author himself, and This Side of Paradise seems to be Fitzgerald’s way of acknowledging this. Despite the lack of trust and admiration for the people in Fitzgerald's work, that does not stop the intrigue and questions that they produce. The emotions and feelings that are real to Fitzgerald’s characters are conveyed to the reader in curiously but elegantly detached and disinterested prose. In the words of John Peale Bishop, Fitzgerald had “The rare faculty of being able to experience romantic and ingenuous emotions and a half hour later regard them with satiric detachment (Shain).”

Fitzgerald knew the ins and outs of the American culture he lived in, and he knew what it was like to see the top but never be able to reach it. ‘“I talk with the authority of failure,” he [Fitzgerald] writes in the notebooks, “Earnest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again (Troy).”’ Much of Fitzgerald’s success can be credited to his ingeniously polished portrayal of the subtleties of the flaunted American life during the first half of the 20th century, the unprecedented popularity of This Side of Paradise in particular.

Edmund Wilson infamously criticised Fitzgerald’s first novel as “Little more than a gesture--a gesture of indefinite revolt (Wilson).” Fitzgerald’s response was “A lot of people thought it [This Side of Paradise] was a fake, and perhaps it was, and a lot of people thought it was a lie, which it was not (Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship).” This answer is indicative of Fitzgerald, and it is the epitome of what Fitzgerald sought and meant in his work: a truthful representation of the lies and distortions that exist in the human fabric of being, whether or not we are aware of it.

A writer in The New Republic wrote that This Side of Paradise was “An amusing and sometimes disconcertingly realistic investigation of a sensitive mind (R.V.A.S.).” This idea doesn’t just apply to Fitzgerald’s first novel; this idea applies to everything in and around his work as a writer. Fitzgerald began his search for the fundamental Amory in This Side of Paradise, and he searched for the rest of his life, but the investigation did not die with him. Because if a writer writes about you, you can never die, and Fitzgerald’s Amory is everyone--the entanglement of emotions and principles, in some shape or form, lives inside all of us. Fitzgerald’s work wasn’t just about Amory, or Charlie, or Gatsby; it was about the shared experience of our humanity and the universal search for the fundamental self.