This Side of Paradise.

We live in the world of I. The I that is in the context of the self. And the Eye that perceives the context of the world that surrounds you through the filter of the I that is in the context of the self. If this confuses the hell out of you, allow me to simplify….Ego. Self-indulgence. Preoccupation with the personal human condition, and in turn regurgitating it onto all aspects of life.

Amory's vanity and narcissism is more than a character trait; it is an emblem of the theme of "egotism" that pervades Fitzgerald's novel. When Amory says that he is an egotist, he does not simply mean that he is self-absorbed; he is revealing an essential philosophical trait of the novel, which is that the self is all-important. He best expresses this idea in the final chapter of the novel, "The Egotist Becomes a Personage," with statements such as, "This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part." Like many people in his generation feeling cut off from tradition and drastically changed after World War I, Amory comes to think that his self is, in a sense, all that he has.

This idea, which is common in other important modernist texts (such as Ezra Pound's famous magazine, the Egoist), is influenced by Freudian psychology, by the modernist generation's dis-avowal of past traditions, and by the individualism that was important to many writers of the time. Often, however, Fitzgerald is also critical and satirical of Amory's egotism, and he certainly mocks its more superficial form of vanity, a trait that characterizes Amory's youth as well as his first love, Isabelle. The egotism and snobbishness of many aristocrats in the novel is also something that Fitzgerald alternatively ridicules and admires. By the end of the novel, it is not necessarily clear whether Amory fully embraces egotism, although he does seem to recognize its valuable artistic and intellectual aspects.

Fight thee ego.