The experience of World War I is central to This Side of Paradise. Though the years of the war themselves are absent from the novel (except for the brief interlude in the middle), the years leading up to the war seem to foreshadow it, and the years following the war are thoroughly defined by the aftermath of the conflict. The novel sketches a portrait of a new generation that is profoundly distinct from its predecessors, and it explores a period marked by progress and the sense that the war has ushered in a completely new era. In this way, the novel argues that World War I was a crucial turning point in history that acutely shaped the lives of those who lived through it—and particularly those who fought in it, like Amory and his friends. On a broader level, the novel’s exploration of the war and modern life gives way to an illustration of Amory’s generation, which struggled to find its way forward in the midst of so much change and was therefore dubbed the “Lost Generation.”
Indeed, the word “generation” appears nearly 20 times over the course of the novel, often in characters’ own words referencing themselves. Exemplified by Amory and his friends, this generation, the novel argues, was defined by its disorientation, aimlessness, and rebellion against old cultural values: “My whole generation is restless,” Amory explains. Amory and other characters in the novel make frequent reference to Victorian values and the rejection thereof, particularly regarding the war and sexuality. There is a sense that Amory’s generation, given their historical circumstances, have a particular urge to rebel against their predecessors given the rapid technological and societal changes they witness and the traumatizing violence they experience. Indeed, World War I is often thought of as a historical turning point that reveals the horrors of modernity, and this influence on the characters in the novel is evident and profound. There is also particular sense that after the war, the world that the “Lost Generation” inhabits has undergone a complete break from the world preceding it: the world moves faster, and “progress” is the guiding concept of the era. This Side of Paradise thus captures the spirit of a generation that has been thrust into modern life by the war.
Related Themes from Other Texts
War, Modern Life, and Generations ThemeTracker
War, Modern Life, and Generations Quotes in This Side of Paradise
All in all Beatrice O’Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all ideas, in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.
“He knows you’re—you’re considered beautiful and all that”—she paused—“and I guess he knows you’ve been kissed.”
At this Isabelle’s little fist had clinched suddenly under the fur robe. She was accustomed to be thus followed by her desperate past, and it never failed to rouse in her the same feeling of resentment; yet—in a strange town it was an advantageous reputation. She was a “Speed,” was she? Well—let them find out.
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.
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.
“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.”
All life was transmitted into terms of their love, all experience, all desires, all ambitions, were nullified—their senses of humor crawled into corners to sleep; their former love affairs seemed faintly laughable and scarcely regretted juvenalia. For the second time in his life Amory had a complete bouleversement and was hurrying into line with his generation.
“ ‘S a mental was’e,’ he insisted with his owl-like wisdom. “Two years my life spent inalleshual vacuity. Los’ idealism, got be physcal anmal,” he shook his fist expressively at Old King Cole, “got be Prussian ‘bout ev’thing, women ‘specially. Use’ be straight ‘bout women college. Now don’givadam. (…) Seek pleasure where find it for to-morrow die. ‘At’s philosophy for me now on.”
“[The war] certainly ruined the old backgrounds, sort of killed individualism out of our generation. (…) I’m not sure it didn’t kill it out of the whole world. Oh, Lord, what a pleasure it used to be to dream I might be a really great dictator or writer or religious or political leader—and now even Leonardo da Vinci or Lorenzo de Medici couldn’t be a real old-fashioned bolt in the world. Life is too huge and complex. The world is so overgrown that it can’t lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger—”
“Rotten, rotten old world,” broke out Eleanor suddenly, “and the wretchedest thing of all is me—oh, why am I a girl? (…) Here I am with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony.”
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.
“Well,” said Amory, “I simply state that I’m a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation—with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones.”
