Amory’s Disillusionment in This Side of Paradise

As many critics observe, nobody has described the despair of the twentieth century better than F. Scott Fitzgerald. He came to prominence as a great American novelist in the 1920s, a period dominated by the postwar novel. In This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald successfully depicts the disillusionment of the protagonist, Amory Blaine, a young romantic egotist in a quest of forming a “personage” in which he has to face various dilemmas and losses. Critics have adopted different approaches, such as feminist theory, gender studies and realism to analyze Amory’s psychic dilemmas. This paper adopts a different approach using early theories of Freud in dealing with the protagonist’s disillusionments concerning his personal life.