Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Tender Is the Night, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Excess, Destruction, and the Failed American Dream
Gender, Mental Illness, and Psychiatry
The Pursuit of Youth and Innocence
Racism and Otherness
Summary
Analysis
It’s 1917 when Doctor Richard Diver, age 26, moves from America to Switzerland. Dick had been “too much of a capital investment” to be sent off to fight in World War I. Instead, he is to complete his medical studies in Zurich. Dick had already “seen around the edges of the war” during his time as an Oxford Rhodes Scholar; he had been in Vienna when it “was old with death.” Nonetheless, the war had never really touched him directly. Later, Dick would reflect that these “war-time years in Europe had been the “favorite” and “heroic” period of his life.
As a young man, Dick epitomizes the American dream—he is intelligent, ambitious, and talented. He avoids being sent to join the war effort because, as a promising doctor, he is considered too valuable. Dick never experiences the horrors of war firsthand and he is therefore able to romanticize the heroism of that period.
Themes
Throughout 1917, it becomes more difficult for Dick to find coal, and he resorts to burning “almost a hundred textbooks” to stay warm, ensuring first that he has read and digested all the books’ contents.
Dick’s determination to learn everything within his books before destroying them to keep warm demonstrates his resourcefulness and ambition.
Themes
Sharing an apartment with Ed Elkins—“second secretary at the Embassy”—Dick is disturbed by the idea that “the quality of his mental processes” might not be all that different from Ed’s, a man he considers simple. Dick ponders that “he must be less in tact” than all “these clever men.” Dick’s time in Zurich is founded on many illusions: “the illusions of eternal strength and health, and of the goodness of people—illusions of a nation.”
Dick fears that he might not actually be as special or marvelous as people believe when he finds himself relating to a man whom he considers to be beneath him. The very fact that this notion troubles Dick reveals how self-absorbed he is, and how desperate he is to be wonderful and heroic.
Themes
After completing his degree, Dick receives orders to join the war effort by supporting a neurological unit in Bar-sur-Aube, France. He is disgusted, however, to find that his work is largely “executive rather than practical.” Discharged in 1919, he returns to Zurich, having completed a short textbook. The narrator admits that it might be unsettling to encounter this unfamiliar representation of Dick in his youth and suggests to the reader that Dick Diver’s “moment” is about to begin.
The narrator suggests that Dick is destined for greatness and warns the reader not to judge Dick based on this representation of his youthful years. Dick is young and full of promise but has not yet mastered the charming confidence that the reader has become familiar with during the first part of the novel.
Themes
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