Eager to Impress
F. Scott Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise at the age of twenty-three for two reasons: to become famous, and to win back his ex-girlfriend Zelda. But you don't even need to know that to see that Fitzgerald is trying to impress us with every line he writes in this book.
Just check out this bad boy:
The advent of prohibition with the "thirty-first" put a sudden stop to the submerging of Amory's sorrows, and when he awoke one morning to find that the old bar-to-bar days were over, he had neither remorse for the past three weeks nor regret that their repetition was impossible. (2.2.2164)
Yikes. That is some overwrought prose right there.
But Fitzgerald isn't some hack with a dictionary: he's both bringing out the big literary stylization to get attention and because this pompous, overblown style totally encapsulates the mindset of pretentious young Amory Blaine. Fitzgerald may be a showoff, but he's a genius showoff.