This Side of Paradise

by

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Themes and Colors
Youth, Innocence, and Coming of Age Theme Icon
Friendship and Masculinity Theme Icon
War, Modern Life, and Generations Theme Icon
Money and Class Theme Icon
Love and Sexuality Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in This Side of Paradise, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Friendship and Masculinity Theme Icon

In many ways, friendships between men are at the heart of This Side of Paradise. Many of Amory’s deepest, most significant relationships are with his friends from Princeton, including Thomas Park D’Invilliers, Burne Holiday, and Dick Humbird. While these relationships are all platonic, the novel suggests that admiration, aspiration, and even desire are central to these friendships: Amory (as well as the rest of the boys) seems to want to emulate his male friends, in addition to wanting to be around them. The novel suggests that this particular combination of, and tension between, identification (that is, seeing oneself in the other) and desire (that is, wanting to be like the other) that exists in friendships between men creates a unique and intense form of intimacy.

Amory spends much of the novel in all-male environments—St. Regis’, Princeton, and the army—that seem to create a particular atmosphere of camaraderie and masculine social life. Amory expresses a particular admiration for and desire to emulate Dick and Burne: regarding the former, Amory admires him as the center of attention of his social groups, thinking his conduct seems effortlessly proper and even aristocratic, an ideal to which Amory himself aspires, saying he never wants to seem like he has worked hard for what he has. When Dick dies, his memory continues to haunt Amory, who references him repeatedly throughout the novel. Regarding Burne, Amory wants to emulate his intelligence, principle, and idiosyncrasy. Amory and Burne take long walks at night together, an intimate activity Amory pursues with only one other character in the novel, Eleanor Savage, with whom he is romantically involved. While Amory self-consciously seeks companionship in women, then, it is in his male friendships that he is able to express himself most honestly.

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Friendship and Masculinity ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Friendship and Masculinity appears in each part of This Side of Paradise. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Friendship and Masculinity Quotes in This Side of Paradise

Below you will find the important quotes in This Side of Paradise related to the theme of Friendship and Masculinity.
Book 1, Chapter 1: Amory, Son of Beatrice Quotes

Vanity, tempered with self-suspicion if not self-knowledge, a sense of people as automatons to his will, a desire to “pass” as many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world. (… ) With this background did Amory drift into adolescence.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine
Page Number: 17-18
Explanation and Analysis:

Amory’s secret ideal had all the slicker qualifications, but, in addition, courage and tremendous brains and talents—also Amory conceded him a bizarre streak that was quite irreconcilable to the slicker proper.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine
Related Symbols: The Slicker
Page Number: 32-33
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 2: Spires and Gargoyles Quotes

“Oh, it isn’t that I mind the glittering caste system,” admitted Amory. “I like having a bunch of hot cats on top, but gosh, Kerry, I’ve got to be one of them.”

“But just now, Amory, you’re only a sweaty bourgeois.”

Amory lay for a moment without speaking.

“I won’t be—long,” he said finally. “But I hate to get anywhere by working for it. I’ll show the marks, don’t you know.”

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker), Kerry Holiday (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Slicker
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:

Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest time of his life. His ideas were in tune with life as he found it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy and enjoy a dozen new-found friendships through the April afternoons.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine
Page Number: 67
Explanation and Analysis:

“No,” declared Tom emphatically, a new Tom, clothed by Brooks, shod by Franks, “I’ve won this game, but I feel as if I never want to play another. You’re all right—you’re a rubber ball, and somehow it suits you, but I’m sick of adapting myself to the local snobbishness of this corner of the world. I want to go where people aren’t barred because of the color of their neckties and the roll of their coats.”

Related Characters: Thomas Parke D’Invilliers (Tom) (speaker), Amory Blaine
Related Symbols: The Slicker
Page Number: 77
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 3: The Egotist Considers Quotes

“A personality is what you thought you were, what this Kerry and Sloane you tell me of evidently are. Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on—I’ve seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides ‘the next thing.’ Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he’s done. He’s a bar on which a thousand things have been hung—glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them.”

Related Characters: Monsignor Darcy (speaker), Amory Blaine, Kerry Holiday, Fred Sloane
Page Number: 95-96
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 4: Narcissus Off Duty Quotes

The intense power Amory felt later in Burne Holiday differed from the admiration he had had for Humbird[…]. Amory was struck by Burne’s intense earnestness[…]. Burne stood vaguely for a land Amory hoped he was drifting toward—and it was almost time that land was in sight.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Burne Holiday, Dick Humbird
Related Symbols: The Slicker
Page Number: 112
Explanation and Analysis:

“You know,” whispered Tom, “what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years. (…) And what we leave here is more than one class; it’s the whole heritage of youth. We’re just one generation—we’re breaking all the links that seemed to bind us here to top-booted and high-stocked generations.”

Related Characters: Thomas Parke D’Invilliers (Tom) (speaker), Amory Blaine
Page Number: 140
Explanation and Analysis:
Interlude: May, 1917 – February, 1919 Quotes

This is the end of one thing: for better or worse you will never again be quite the Amory Blaine that I knew, never again will we meet as we have met, because your generation is growing hard, much harder than mine ever grew, nourished as they were in the stuff of the nineties.

Related Characters: Monsignor Darcy (speaker), Amory Blaine
Page Number: 145
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 1: The Débutante Quotes

SHE: Well, Amory, you don’t mind—do you? When I meet a man that doesn’t bore me to death after two weeks, perhaps it’ll be different.

HE: Odd, you have the same point of view on men that I have on women.

SHE: I’m not really feminine, you know—in my mind.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker), Rosalind Connage (speaker)
Page Number: 159
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 4: The Supercilious Sacrifice Quotes

Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Alec Connage, Jill Wayne
Page Number: 228
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 5: The Egotist Becomes a Personage Quotes

Life opened up in one of its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: “Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.”

On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Monsignor Darcy, Stephen Blaine
Page Number: 245
Explanation and Analysis: