The Consideration of Poor People in F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise

In the final chapter of F. Scott Fitzgerald's rather autobiographical novel This Side of Paradise (1920) the protagonist of the story, Amory Blaine, who started out very privileged but at this point has been rather knocked about by life--by the Great War, by the fickleness of fortune in a capitalist society, by much else--he finds himself confronting social realities. "Never before in his life had Amory considered poor people," Fitzgerald tells us, but Amory was poor now, and "the numerous unpleasant aspects of city life without money occurred to him in threatening procession." He thinks of the subway ride--its "ghastly, stinking crush" with its "squalid phantasmagoria of breath, and old cloth on human bodies and the smells of the food men ate," amid which were "the car cards thrusting themselves out at one," the people who might be "leaning on you," the indignities and worse involved in the little selfishnesses toward which it pressed the riders ("the man deciding not to give his seat to a woman, hating her for it; the woman hating him for not doing it"). Blaine "pictured," too, "the rooms where these people lived," with their cheap and "blistered" wallpaper, and "tin bathtubs and gloomy hallways and verdureless, unnamable spaces in back of the buildings," while "even love dressed as seduction--a sordid murder around the corner, illicit motherhood in the flat above" and made of "birth and marriage and death . . . loathsome, secret things," as indeed everything seemed loathsome, not least the shame people felt at being "tired and poor," and the disgust that others who were tired and poor felt when they saw it in others. Such lives impressed Amory as "dirtier than any battle-field he had seen" as a veteran of the Great War, and "harder to contemplate than any actual hardship moulded of mire and sweat and danger."

Contrasting it with the stories of O. Henry it seemed to him that no, there was no romance or beauty in it, no matter what some said, just "coarseness, physical filth, and stupidity," and if his first reaction to it all was hatred for poor people, ultimately he found himself hating the System, though with what consequence we never see. The novel, after all, was about the disillusioning of a youth who "had grown up to a thousand books, a thousand lies" that made of him a "romantic egotist"--while now the egotist became a "personage," and it is there that the tale ends.