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
Baby Warren is awoken in the early hours of the morning by a knock at her door: the concierge informs her that Dick is in trouble with the police. Arriving at the police station, Baby hears Dick’s voice wailing in desperation. She pushes past the police officers to reach Dick’s cell, from where he tells her that the police have put out is eye and that he’s been beaten. Swirling around in fury she screams at the two officers, letting “her passion scorch around them until they sweated out apologies for their impotence.” She reassures Dick and rushes out to the Embassy, “throwing a last glance of infinite menace” at the police.
Although Baby doesn’t care for Dick a great deal, her snobbish belief in the greatness and superiority of Americans causes her to unleash a powerful fury, which she directs at the Italian police officers guarding Dick’s cell. Her intense anger is a force to be reckoned with, and she leaves the officers feeling emasculated.
Themes
Arriving at the Embassy, Baby shakes the porter roughly by the shoulders when he bars her from entering the building. Refusing to take no for an answer, Baby’s loud commotion is enough to rouse a young official from his sleep and she pushes her way inside to speak with him. The man descends down the stairs a little, careful to remain in the darkness so as to conceal his moustache bandage and the pink cream on his face. The man assures Baby that nothing can be done until nine a.m. when the Consulate opens, explaining, “Your brother-in-law has broken the laws of this country and been put in jail, just as an Italian might be put in jail in New York.”
With a bold egotism and sense of self-importance, Baby rushes to the Embassy, demanding help and attention, even though the Embassy is not open yet. Baby believes that, because Dick is American, he deserves immediate special treatment even though he has actually broken the law. Fitzgerald’s humorous description of the Embassy official—covered in a strange face cream and moustache bandage—makes him seem ridiculous and emasculated. Fitzgerald satirizes the bureaucratic nature of both government systems and Baby’s self-important attitude of American exceptionalism.
Themes
At the Consulate, Baby finds only the cleaners. Unsure of what to do next, she takes a taxi to Collis Clay’s hotel. After persuading the receptionist to let her in, Baby makes her way up to Collis’s room. He is completely naked when she arrives but dresses hurriedly and travels back with her to Dick’s prison cell. Collis agrees to wait with Dick to ensure he’s not hurt further, while Baby drives back to the Consulate.
Collis Clay’s nakedness serves to heighten and emphasize the humor and ridiculousness of the situation. Baby is incensed and determined, however, and pays no notice—nothing will stand in her way.
Themes
Back at the Consulate, Baby waits half an hour before unleashing her tirade of fury upon the Consul in his office. The Consul perceives Baby, “the American Woman,” as having an “irrational temper”—the same one that “had broken the moral back of a race and made a nursery out of a continent.” Her vitriol is “too much for him,” and he calls the vice-consul. “Baby had won.”
The man at the Consulate perceives Baby’s temper as petulant and childish, and as a distinctly American affliction. He dislikes that Americans believe they are entitled to special treatment, especially in Europe where they can throw their wealth and power around in order to get their way. The reference to making “a nursery out of a continent” suggests that American expatriates act like children in Europe, while locals are forced to clean up their mess.
Themes
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In the light of morning, Dick’s rage has subsided, and he feels “a vast criminal irresponsibility.” Dick has “bizarre feelings” about how this event will change him moving forward. He feels strongly that “No mature Aryan is able to profit by a humiliation; when he forgives it has become part of his life,” and so Dick decides not to forgive and not to speak of retribution.
Upon waking, Dick realizes how he has behaved and feels terrible about it—he has lost the good part of himself that he resolved to resurrect after his father’s death. He is stubborn, however, and decides not to apologize for his violent actions. Further, Dick is “Aryan”—white—and believes that his race makes him superior to Italian people and therefore exempt from asking for forgiveness.
Themes
The vice-consul, “an overworked young man named Swanson,” accompanies Dick to the court and leaves him and Collis with a lawyer. When Dick enters the courtroom there is a loud heckling from the crowd above. A stranger explains that a man had been brought into court that morning for raping and killing a fiver-year-old. The audience had mistaken Dick for the culprit, hence the uproar when he had arrived. The lawyer returns to tell Dick that he’s been freed, but Dick cries out that he wants “to make a speech […] I want to explain to these people how I raped a five-year-old girl. Maybe I did—.”
The meaning of Dick’s strange request—of wanting to make a speech pretending he is a child rapist—is ambiguous. The phrase suggests that Dick recognizes and feels guilty about his own troubling attraction to girls who are too young for him. Why he would want to finally admit this now, though, and in public, is unclear. Perhaps this indicates that Dick has hit rock bottom—he is a drunk, his body has been beaten, and he has had to be saved and rescued by a woman whom he detests.
Themes
Dick avoids eye contact with Baby on the way back to his hotel room. There, a doctor (who Dick thinks is “one of that least palatable of European types”) cleans Dick’s wounds and sets his broke nose, ribs, and fingers. Dick tells Baby and the doctor his version of events, but nobody has anything to say to him. Dick falls asleep after being given morphine, and Baby waits with him until a nurse arrives to take over. Baby is tired but has the satisfactory feeling that “they now possesse[s] a moral superiority over him for as long as he prove[s] of any use.”
It finally becomes clear why Baby was so determined to help Dick—it wasn’t because she really cared that much, but because she wanted to gain power over him. Dick is now indebted to Baby, and she probably won’t let him forget it. Fitzgerald’s depiction of the expatriate scene is now markedly different from the descriptions of fantastical and sparkling parties from Book 1 of the novel. Bitterness, jealousy, and manipulation are commonplace in this wealthy circle.
Themes
