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
Even after marrying Tommy, Nicole tries to stay in contact with Dick. She often says, “I loved Dick and I’ll never forget him,” to which Tommy answers, “Of course not—why should you?” She learns that Dick opened a new office in Buffalo but hears that it wasn’t a success. Later, Nicole finds out that Dick has moved to a different town, but again hears that he had some legal problems and had to leave.
It appears that Dick’s life in America is littered with failure, and he’s unable to make a new start for himself. Dick Diver, once a promising young man sent to Europe to become a brilliant doctor, has been forced to return to America—a place he decided long ago had nothing for him—with nothing but a failed career and a broken marriage to show for himself.
Themes
Dick never sends for the children, and never replies to Nicole’s letter when she offers to send him money. In the last letter she received from Dick, he had told her that he was practicing in a town called Geneva, New York. Nicole had looked it up on the map and found it to be located near the finger lakes and “considered a pleasant place.” Nicole likes to imagine that Dick’s career is “biding its time again like Grant’s in Galena.”
Dick’s tragic downfall is epitomized by the fact that he never sends for the children, with the miserable suggestion that he may never see them again. Nicole thinks of Dick often and never gives up on him. She compares him to Ulysses S. Grant, an American Civil War hero—and later the 18th U.S. president—holding out hope that Dick might yet fulfill his American dreams, after all.
Themes
