Fitzgerald's New Thought on Youth in All the Sad Young Men

It is widely acknowledged that F. Scott FitzgeraId had a fixation on youth both in his writing and throughout his life. When he was twenty-nine years old, Fitzgerald wrote a letter to his editor, which said he wanted to die at thirty. In 1926, when he was approaching thirty, Fitzgerald published a collection of short stories titled All the Sad Young Men. It is reasonable to assume that All the Sad Young Men is essential to the study of Fitzgerald's thought on youth. However, it has been disregarded for a long time on the ground that it does not have an integrated theme even though each individual short story in the collection has been discussed. This essay is an attempt to demonstrate that All the Sad Young Men has the unified theme of youth, and furthermore, to clarify Fitzgerald's new thought on youth. Fitzgerald titled the collection, which consists of nine short stories All the Sad Young Men, because he wanted to deal with young men of his generation in unhappy moods. Indeed, only seven stories depict "young men," while all of the nine stories deal with "sad" men. Therefore, we can conclude that Fitzgerald intended the theme of his collection to be "youth" rather than "sadness." It is significant that while seven stories concern young men, the remaining two stories ("The Baby Party" and "Absolution") deal with an adult and a child. In "The Baby Party," the adult protagonist gives up his attachment to youth and contentedly accepts his role as an adult at the end. On the other hand, in "Absolution," the child protagonist decides to remain young by refusing to grow up. Both the adult and the child individually have clear ways of coping with the passage of time; however, it is not easy for young men to choose between maturity and youth. Fitzgerald may have included two stories on an adult and a child in the collection in order to emphasize the fact that the acceptance or rejection of the passage of time is a problem that the youth face. There are three gradual phases in the other stories on young men. In the first phase, the young men long to stop the passage of time and remain eternally young. In the second phase, they perceive that there is no eternal youth. In the third phase, they come to terms with the passage of time that deprives them of their youth. The point that needs to be stressed here is that although these phases are linear in the content, they are designed to be circular. This point reveals his desire to overcome his fixation on youth and at the same time, his reluctance to do so. However, there is no doubt that Fitzgerald came up with new ideas on youth in All the Sad Young Men