This Side of Paradise (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

devil is associated with Dick Humbird, a charming, popular, and powerful Princeton undergraduate, who has died an ugly death in a drunk-driving car accident. The reader might be led to believe that the devil tempts those who, like Faust, lose their souls to gain wealth, status, and position. And since wealth and status are the only way to “get the girl,” there is a subtle association between the devil, women, and sexuality. Amory frequently equates his sexual feelings and experiences with evil, or with sightings of “the devil,” and he is sometimes repulsed, even terrified, by them; he eventually concludes that “the problem of evil had solidified ... into the problem of sex” (p. 259). The intricate connection between Amory’s sense of evil, sexuality, and his own identity is summed up by Sy Kahn, who writes that “This Side of Paradise is something of an allegory in which American Youth is caught between the forces of Good and Evil.... Evil is identified with sex: there the devil wields his greatest powers” (“This Side of Paradise: The Pageantry of Disillusion,” p. 53). Each of Amory’s three encounters with this imagined devil signifies that he is at a crisis point. The devil first appears to him when he is in a New York café with his friend Fred Sloane and two girls, and a middle-aged man dressed in a brown suit smiles at him. Later, when he and Sloane go to an apartment with the two girls and Amory decides to give in to his sexual impulses with the girl named Axia, the man he had seen in the café appears again: “There the man half sat, half leaned against a pile of pillows on the corner divan” (p. 104). Amory identifies him as the devil by his terrible, incongruous feet: “The feet were all wrong.” Terrified, Amory perceives that “the whole divan that held the man was alive ... like wriggling worms” (pp. 104-105). In his horror, Amory runs out of the hotel and into an alley.
    Amory’s third and final encounter with this evil presence occurs when he is in a hotel room with Rosalind’s brother, Alec Connage, who is with Jill, a “gaudy, vermillion-lipped blonde.” Discovered by the house detectives, Alec could be liable under the Mann Act (1910) for bringing the underage Jill across state lines for “immoral purposes.” In the room with them hangs a tainted aura, which Amory once again recognizes as the devil. When Amory decides to sacrifice himself for Alec by pretending that Jill is with him, the aura fades at once from the room, and Amory senses the pure spirit of his dead mentor, Monsignor Darcy. The implication is that by sacrificing himself for Alec, Amory is finally moving away from his immature self and toward his true identity.
    Amory’s visions of the devil are manifestations of his own impulses gone out of control and clear evidence of the influence of his early Catholic training. As Tanner notes, Fitzgerald’s “examination of evil in the moral life was shaped by his American Puritan heritage and by his Catholic upbringing” (p. 66). Confronting the devil’s power is critical to the Church’s adherents; they must first acknowledge the power in order to defend themselves against it, knowing that it cannot be overcome if it is ignored. Amory’s apparitions are not unlike those that appeared to the great saints and others who also wrestled with these evil forces: In his Confessions (c. A.D. 400) Saint Augustine writes about the struggle against his own demons, which he sees as “the source of evil,” and for which he can find no explanation, and James Joyce has Stephen Dedalus confront his demons in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In fact, Stephen is assured that “frequent and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of the soul had not fallen and that the devil raged to make it fall.” Overcoming these temptations is the only way to become “a certain kind of artist,” but Stephen Dedalus finally realizes he must overcome them without the benefit