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
Dick bumps into Tommy Barban, a natural leader and “hero,” playing cards in a café in Munich. Tommy is joking around with three men—Prince Chillicheff, Mr. McKibben, and Mr. Hannan—when he sees Dick and exclaims, “You don’t look so—[…] jaunty as you used to.”
Tommy immediately notices the marked difference in Dick—he looks sullen and fatigued and doesn’t have his usually bouncy charm about him. Tommy, on the other hand, is as active and amiable as ever.
Themes
Chillicheff, McKibben, and Hannan go on to explain how they were imprisoned in Russia and tell a captivating story about their escape. When McKibben invites Dick to travel with him in the car to Innsbruck the following day, Dick quickly declines the invitation. Distracted for a moment by the unappealing thought of squeezing into a packed car with McKibben and his family, Dick realizes that the others are discussing Abe North. “Didn’t you read The Herald this morning?” asks Tommy, “He’s dead. He was beaten to death in a speakeasy in New York.”
Abe’s death was extremely undignified. The fact that he was beaten and left to die in a bar suggests that he was never able to overcome his drinking problem and continued to run into scuffs and problems after the Divers left him in Paris. Abe’s fate is contrasted with Tommy’s, who is portrayed as a brave and masculine warrior. Abe, then, becomes the image of an indulgent American who met his demise through excessive drinking and reckless behavior, while Tommy, the European, is cast as a sort of hero.
Themes
Dick decides to leave, but he is so shocked by the news of Abe’s death that he is barely conscious of the journey back to his hotel. Tommy invites him to join them for dinner the following evening but Dick declines “hastily.” That night Dick awakes to a possession of war veterans marching outside his window “with a sort of swagger for a lost magnificence, a past effort, a forgotten sorrow.” Seeing the “mournful march,” Dick is overcome with “regret for Abe’s death, and his own youth of ten years ago.”
The war procession outside of Dick’s window remind him of all the hopes, dreams, and values he nurtured as a young man: to be honorable, manly, and heroic. Dick was spared from the war effort on the assumption that he would become a great medical man, but he has achieved little success in his life. The war veterans thus serve to remind Dick of his own failures.
Themes
