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Fitzgerald divides the plot of his novel into two books. Book One, entitled “The Romantic Egotist,” focuses on Amory’s childhood, youth at a prep school and career at Princeton University. Book Two, entitled “The Education of a Personage,” shows the process by which Amory gathers stature. Book Two marks the shift of the narrative voice from soliloquy to dramatic monologue (
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This Side of Paradise is a bildungrosman, or novel of development or apprenticeship (123). For example, the fact that he was to get no more money from the rail companies. Soon Amory realizes it was embodied in the image of Dick Humbird, who was killed in an automobile accident, a sad victim of his own excesses (132). He believed that by an effort of will, it is possible for a person to master the horrors of dark as he has. Separating the books is an interlude made up of two letters describing Amory’s experience in World War I.
Amory’s disillusionment following his break up did not deter him from pursuit of his ideal. In other words, having her is not what he imagined. His image of himself may be vague and incomplete, but its mere existence is sufficient to harness his energy and drive him toward his dream. Amory’s repeated failures to win the women he loves, not only chart his course to maturity, but also help shape his life. Also, it was a lazy and good-looking place, rather like himself. Amory may be alone at the end of the novel, seemingly lost in the maze of his own disillusionment, but when he emerges from its tangled pathways, thinking his way through his own confusion, he will find again in his fundamental self the will to dream on.
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