In Book 1, Chapter 1, Fitzgerald introduces the reader to Amory's whirlwind childhood with his mother and, after his mother's health appears to deteriorate, his uneasy adjustment to his adopted home of Minneapolis. To emphasize Amory's growth, Fitzgerald uses personification to transform his shoes into characters themselves:
Amory spent nearly two years in Minneapolis. The first winter he wore moccasins that were born yellow, but after many applications of oil and dirt assumed their mature color, a dirty, greenish brown [...].
Like Amory himself, the moccasins are growing up: they mirror the maturation of their owner and, as Amory learns the rules of the road in Minneapolis, they age with him. Although This Side of Paradise is the story of Amory Blaine's coming of age, Fitzgerald not only writes of Amory's own changes but also about how those changes affect the world around him—as well as Amory's perception of the world around him. While shortly hereafter the reader will see how Amory bends the worlds of St. Regis and Princeton around him as he comes into his own as a young socialite, the first objects in the novel to change according to Amory's growth are these tattered old moccasins.
In Book 1, Chapter 2, Amory immerses himself in his new life as a Princeton student. It is immediately clear to the reader that the school has an enormous hold on Amory, and Fitzgerald uses personification and metaphor to show how Amory conceives of the school and his place within it:
The college dreamed on—awake. He felt a nervous excitement that might have been the very throb of its slow heart. It was a stream where he was to throw a stone whose faint ripple would be vanishing almost as it left his hand. As yet he had given nothing, he had taken nothing.
In the first half of this passage, Princeton becomes a living body with a heartbeat that Amory believes he can feel as he contemplates the impact he hopes to have on the institution. However significant this impact might feel for Amory, though, he is just one student in one class of a university with a long and storied history—the scale of which Fitzgerald emphasizes in the metaphorical comparison between Amory's effect on Princeton and the inconsequential ripple of a stone thrown into a stream.
Over the course of Amory's tenure at Princeton, the school emerges as a character in its own right: a constant preoccupation that Amory manipulates, much like the women he tries to "love." Interestingly, Amory is quite fickle when it comes to his feelings about Princeton—sometimes he's obsessed with it, and sometimes he's disinterested in it. All in all, though, he's primarily concerned only with what he stands to gain from his relationship to the school.
