This Side of Paradise Literary Devices

Explanation and Analysis—Love of the Performance:

Fitzgerald excoriates the upper class for their intensely manipulative social mores throughout This Side of Paradise. One motif that relates to Fitzgerald's exploration of money and class is that of theatrical performance and opera. In Book 1, Chapter 1, Fitzgerald uses a metaphor to explain Amory's social struggles at St. Regis:

With a dread of being alone he attached a few friends, but since they were not among the elite of the school he used them simply as mirrors of himself, audiences before which he might do that posing absolutely essential to him. He was unbearably lonely, desperately unhappy.

Even in his youth, Amory feels the importance of performance as a survival mechanism. He makes friends in order to find an audience, searching for people for whom he can perform as an elitist, snobbish young man—the way he has seen his mother perform and the way he is used to performing at home.

Later, in Book 1, Chapter 2, the reader meets Isabelle—the first woman in whom Amory maintains an all-consuming romantic interest. Though Amory, at this point, thinks of himself as a master of charm, Isabelle is also a highly cunning socialite—which Fitzgerald makes clear in a set of similes that cast Isabelle's own charm in terms of theatrical performance:

As an actress even in the full of her own conscious magnetism gets a deep impression of most of the people in the front row, so Isabelle sized up her antagonist.

In this first simile, Fitzgerald suggests that Isabelle's ability to command her friends and lovers is similar to how an actress commands an audience—a self-aware performance that also enables Isabelle to scrutinize her company. In this case, Amory becomes the antagonist in Isabelle's play, a distinction that foreshadows his eventual cruelty toward her.

Later in their first interaction, Fitzgerald returns to his depiction of Isabelle as a performer:

But Isabelle strung the names into a fabrication of gaiety that would have dazzled a Viennese nobleman. Such is the power of young contralto voices on sink-down sofas.

As Isabelle name-drops the young men in her life to Amory, Fitzgerald's simile makes clear the captivating power of her act. She has the voice of a "young contralto," a reference to an operatic singing range, and she employs it like an opera singer of such skill as to "dazzle" even the Viennese gentry, a group famous for its patronage of the opera. The invocation of such an elite performance further cements the elitism of Amory and Isabelle's world and the incredible calculation and manipulation of their behavior.

Explanation and Analysis—Amory's Faucet:

In Book 1, Chapter 2, Amory comes into his own as a Princetonian and as a young man. Describing his protagonist's particular—and peculiar—charm, Fitzgerald uses a simile to explain Amory's distinctive mode of attraction:

He lacked somehow that intense animal magnetism that so often accompanies beauty in men or women; his personality seemed rather a mental thing, and it was not in his power to turn it on and off like a water faucet. But people never forgot his face.

In this simile, Fitzgerald reveals some of Amory's remaining innocence—though he tries to be in complete control in all situations, he has not yet gained dominance over his own personality; that is, he can't control himself like he might control a "water faucet." Even as Amory himself may think that he is at the height of his powers, Fitzgerald uses digressions like this passage to leave Amory's head and show the reader his character from the omniscient perspective of the narrator.

Amory's wavering command of his own personality—his control of "the faucet," or his ability to know how and when and why to behave a certain way—is at the center of this portion of the novel, and his time at Princeton is largely devoted to his attempts to bring his personality to bear on the friends and romantic interests in his life.

Unlock with LitCharts A⁺

Explanation and Analysis—Love of the Performance:

Fitzgerald excoriates the upper class for their intensely manipulative social mores throughout This Side of Paradise. One motif that relates to Fitzgerald's exploration of money and class is that of theatrical performance and opera. In Book 1, Chapter 1, Fitzgerald uses a metaphor to explain Amory's social struggles at St. Regis:

With a dread of being alone he attached a few friends, but since they were not among the elite of the school he used them simply as mirrors of himself, audiences before which he might do that posing absolutely essential to him. He was unbearably lonely, desperately unhappy.

Even in his youth, Amory feels the importance of performance as a survival mechanism. He makes friends in order to find an audience, searching for people for whom he can perform as an elitist, snobbish young man—the way he has seen his mother perform and the way he is used to performing at home.

Later, in Book 1, Chapter 2, the reader meets Isabelle—the first woman in whom Amory maintains an all-consuming romantic interest. Though Amory, at this point, thinks of himself as a master of charm, Isabelle is also a highly cunning socialite—which Fitzgerald makes clear in a set of similes that cast Isabelle's own charm in terms of theatrical performance:

As an actress even in the full of her own conscious magnetism gets a deep impression of most of the people in the front row, so Isabelle sized up her antagonist.

In this first simile, Fitzgerald suggests that Isabelle's ability to command her friends and lovers is similar to how an actress commands an audience—a self-aware performance that also enables Isabelle to scrutinize her company. In this case, Amory becomes the antagonist in Isabelle's play, a distinction that foreshadows his eventual cruelty toward her.

Later in their first interaction, Fitzgerald returns to his depiction of Isabelle as a performer:

But Isabelle strung the names into a fabrication of gaiety that would have dazzled a Viennese nobleman. Such is the power of young contralto voices on sink-down sofas.

As Isabelle name-drops the young men in her life to Amory, Fitzgerald's simile makes clear the captivating power of her act. She has the voice of a "young contralto," a reference to an operatic singing range, and she employs it like an opera singer of such skill as to "dazzle" even the Viennese gentry, a group famous for its patronage of the opera. The invocation of such an elite performance further cements the elitism of Amory and Isabelle's world and the incredible calculation and manipulation of their behavior.

Unlock with LitCharts A⁺

Explanation and Analysis—Mind on Fire:

In Book 1, Chapter 3, Amory has a startling lapse in his cool, calculating demeanor as his sanity appears to waver on a night out with his friends in New York. In the sequence that follows, Fitzgerald uses a host of literary devices—including imagery, metaphor, and simile—to detail Amory's hallucinogenic feeling of horror:

There was a minute while temptation crept over him like a warm wind, and his imagination turned to fire, and he took the glass from Phoebe's hand.

Fitzgerald's language mirrors Amory's feverish state of mind through the use of tactile imagery ("warmth" and "fire"), which appears in both a simile and a metaphor. Amory's sudden feeling of temptation—the urge to indulge after an uncharacteristically sober evening—feels like a "warm wind." And then, as his mind begins to hallucinate, his brain "turns to fire." The incendiary, even violent undertone of this metaphor anticipates the horrifying sequence to come, in which Amory will see a mysterious man who seems to be his deceased friend, Dick Humbird.

Until this point in the novel, Amory has seemed to be unaffected by the sudden death of Humbird in a horrible automobile accident. The intense mood shift that this passage precipitates reflects the intensity of Amory's sudden confrontation with Humbird and, for that matter, with his own unprocessed emotions.

Unlock with LitCharts A⁺

This Side of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald

This Side of Paradise: Similes 3 key examples