ed to struggle with this tension between the desire to participate fully in the romantic era of the twenties and to become the observer and social critic of his age. Fitzgerald was fascinated by wealth and position, and he spent a good deal of creative energy and money in trying to ingratiate himself with that class. At the same time, he, like many of his artistic contemporaries, saw with acute clarity the weaknesses and illusions that accompanied money and status. Fitzgerald's alienation, therefore, is not as pronounced as that of, say, Hemingway; he managed to romanticize an age and a lifestyle even as he criticized it.
The theme of disillusionment dominates Fitzgerald's work. Amory Blaine, the protagonist in This Side of Paradise, is stripped of all his romantic illusions, destined with the rest of his generation "finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride . . . dedicated more than the last to a fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken . . . " (282). Still, even in the midst of regret and loss, Amory still experiences "the faint stirrings of old ambitions and unrealized dreams;" in the end he stretches out his arms to the sky and cries, "I know myself . . . but that is all" (282). Unlike his more cynical contemporaries, Fitzgerald is able to survive his disillusionment with at least a modicum of his youthful idealism intact.
In his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, Fitzgerald probes beneath the brilliant surface of life to expose the darker underside. His protagonist, Anthony, is a sophisticated, independently wealthy aesthete whose illusions are shattered by the ruthless impact of reality. Yet even in his irresponsibility and dissipation, Anthony is given a heroic quality, "a kind of moral grandeur that contradicts the objective development of his adventure" (Eble 54). His refusal to "submit to medioc...