This Side of Paradise | This Side of Paradise: The Dominating Intention
In the following essay, Gross argues that, despite critical contention to the contrary, there is intent, unity, and force in This Side of Paradise if the novel is read as a bildungsroman.
Considered opinion of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel has not changed much since 1924 when Edmund Wilson labelled it “a phantasmagoria of incident which had no dominating intention to endow it with unity and force, . . . really not about anything: intellectually it amounts to little more than a gesture—a gesture of indefinite revolt.” Those critics who discuss the book at all verify Wilson’s judgment; if the novel is at all significant, that significance lies in its stylistic place in the Fitzgerald canon or in its historic place in the Fitzgerald canon or in its historic...
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