by James E. Miller, Jr.

Fitzgerald once referred to an early version of This Side of Paradise
as a "picaresque ramble" or a "prose, modernistic Childe Harolde," ¹
terms which well describe the episodic nature of his novel. There is no
continuous line of action but rather a series of episodes related one to
the other by Amory Blaine, the central character. The story is the bi-
ography of Amory Blaine during the formative years of his life. The
episodes are related in that they constitute collectively the education
of the hero, but there is no single plot-line to unify the novel. Such a
loose structure lends itself well to documentation: an abundance of
detailed incidents may be included so long as they revolve around
the hero. As the reviewer for the Publisher's Weekly said -- "It isn't a
story in the regular sense: there's no beginning, except the beginning
of Amory Blaine, born healthy, wealthy and extraordinarily good-look-
ing, and by way of being spoiled by a restless mother whom he quaintly
calls by her first name, Beatrice. There's no middle to the story, except
the eager fumbling at life of this same handsome boy, proud, clean-
minded, born to conquer yet fumbling, at college and in love with
Isabelle, then Clara, then Rosalind, then Eleanor. No end to the story
except the closing picture of this same boy in his early twenties, a bit
less confident about life, with no God in his heart . . . his ideas still in
riot." ² With no central action, the book can have no beginning, middle,
or end in the conventional sense.

Henry James's great demand for the novel was a center of interest
or a motivating idea. Taking his cue from James, Percy Lubbock as-
serted that a novel "cannot begin to take shape" until it has "a subject,
one and whole and irreducible . . . for its support." The question the
critic must pose is "what the novel in his hand is about. What was the
novelist's intention, in a phrase?" If the novel's "subject" cannot be
stated in a phrase, if it is not "expressible in ten words that reveal its

A Gesture of Indefinite Revolt. From The Fictional Technique of Scott Fitzgerald
( The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957). Copyright © 1957 by James E. Miller, Jr. Re-
printed by permission of the author and Martinus Nijhoff.

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