Set in the 1920s, Tender is the Night depicts a group of wealthy American expatriates traveling around Europe during the Roaring Twenties. This period—between the end of World War I and the Wall Street crash of 1929—was a time of great prosperity in America and Western Europe. Fitzgerald himself coined the term “the Jazz Age” to describe the glamor and decadence of the era. In Tender is the Night, Dick Diver, the ambitious son of a humble minister, embodies the American dream. His charisma and aspirations stand to bring him much success in life, but after years of excessive drinking, decadent parties, and irresponsible decisions, Dick finds himself poor and alone, having destroyed all the relationships that he once valued. Dick’s story thus reveals the central message of Tender is the Night: excess and vice inevitably lead to destruction and downfall.
At the beginning of Book One, Dick is the perfect picture of a modern American man; charming, attractive, and popular, he epitomizes the excitement and possibility of the Jazz Age. Dick’s extraordinary magnetism draws others towards him. Upon arriving to the beach on the French Riviera, Rosemary, a fellow guest at Gausse’s hotel, notices immediately that “whatever [Dick] said released a burst of laughter. Even those who, like herself, were too far away to hear, sent out antennae of attention.” Dick is “kind and charming” and promises “an endless succession of magnificent possibilities.” Through Dick and his wife, Nicole Diver, Fitzgerald brings to life the excess and decadence that characterized the Jazz Age. The Divers “were fashionable people” and “seemed to have a very good time.” Their wealthy expatriate circle spends the first chapters of the book throwing lavish parties and romping around Europe with reckless abandon. However, Fitzgerald reveals fleeting glimpses into the dark side of their sparkling scene through Abe North, who suffers from alcoholism as a result of their immoderate lifestyle. Abe’s self-destruction should serve as a warning to the other characters, but they pay no heed.
Ultimately, Dick’s indulgent and unrelenting pursuit of pleasure costs him his profession, health, popularity, and romantic relationships. There is not one turning point to mark the beginning of Dick’s decline, but there are plenty of warning signs. Finding it difficult to juggle the demands of his marriage with Nicole and his love affair with Rosemary, for example, Dick realizes that he is losing control over both. Dick reflects that Rosemary, as young and immature as she is, is managing their relationship more “authoritatively than he.” Dick experiences another shock when he witnesses Maria Wallis, a vague acquaintance from their expatriate scene, shoot an Englishman in the train station for no apparent reason: “the shots had entered into all their lives: echoes of violence followed them out onto the pavement.” Regardless of the exact moment, by Chapter 20, Dick’s emotional deterioration is well underway—“he was profoundly unhappy” but blind to “what was going on round about him.”
By the end of Book Two, the reader has witnessed the slow and gradual disintegration of Dick’s marriage, characterized by cold silences but punctuated with frenzied arguments. After a violent quarrel that culminates in Nicole trying to drive their car off the road, Dick decides to “go away alone.” While traveling, Dick runs into an old friend, Tommy Barban, who remarks that Dick doesn’t look “so jaunty” as he used to. The night after learning that Abe has died, Dick wakes to a procession of war veterans outside, marching mournfully “with a sort of swagger for a lost magnificence.” This image reminds Dick of his own wasted potential, and symbolizes the loss and sorrow that now characterizes his life: “Dick’s lungs burst for a moment with regret for Abe’s death and his own youth of ten years ago.” Disheveled and saddened, Dick visits Rosemary in Rome, but much has changed between them in the three years since they were romantically involved with one another. After a jealous and angry outburst upon learning about her relationship with her new lover, Nicotera, he admits: “I’m the Black Death […] I don’t seem to bring people happiness any more.”
The chaos and destruction that surrounds Dick climaxes when he gets drunk with his acquaintance Collis Clay that night. Following a row with a musician in the bar, Dick attempts to get a taxi back to the hotel. During a drunken quarrel over prices, however, he is overcome by a “savage” rage and instigates a bloody fight with the driver. When he wakes from unconsciousness, Dick finds himself alone in an Italian prison cell in a “bloody haze, choking and sobbing.” Having lost his job at the clinic—due to his negligence and drinking problem—Dick returns to France with Nicole. They try once more to salvage their broken marriage, but Dick is a shell of his former self and is incapable of loving Nicole and the children with the “inexhaustible energy” he had once personified.
Through the story’s tragic ending, Fitzgerald draws parallels between Dick’s personal ruin and the calamitous end to American prosperity that shook the nation with the financial crash of 1929. The penultimate chapter of the book depicts Dick’s last moments in Europe. He is without “nice thoughts and dreams to have about himself,” as he says goodbye to his children. Indeed, returning to America devoid of the bright ambitions that defined him as a young man, Dick symbolizes the failed American dream. Living in a small American town, far from his family, and without professional prospects, Dick is haunted by the consequences of his own greed and excess. Ultimately, Dick’s sad story becomes a metaphor for the 1920s; reckless hedonism comes at a high cost.
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Excess, Destruction, and the Failed American Dream ThemeTracker
Excess, Destruction, and the Failed American Dream Quotes in Tender Is the Night
Her naïveté responded whole-heartedly to the expensive simplicity of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack of innocence, unaware that it was all a selection of quality rather than quantity from the run of the world’s bazaar; and that the simplicity of behavior also, the nursery-like peace and good will, the emphasis on the simpler virtues, was part of a desperate bargain with the gods and had been attained through struggles she could not have guessed at.
“I want to give a really bad party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.”
He sometimes looked back with awe at the carnivals of affection he had given, as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered to satisfy an impersonal blood lust […] But to be included in Dick Diver’s world for a while was a remarkable experience […] He won everyone quickly with an exquisite consideration and a politeness that moved so fast and intuitively that it could be examined only in its effect. Then, without caution, lest the first bloom of the relation wither, he opened the gate to his amusing world. So long as they subscribed to it completely, their happiness was his preoccupation, but at the first flicker of doubt as to its all-inclusiveness he evaporated before their eyes, leaving little communicable memory of what he had said or done.
Nicole was the product of much ingenuity and toil. For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new tractors—these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole, and as the whole system swayed and thundered onward it lent a feverish bloom to such processes of hers as wholesale buying, like the flush of a fireman’s face holding his post before a spreading blaze. She illustrated very simple principles, containing in herself her own doom, but illustrated them so accurately that there was grace in the procedure.”
They stood in an uncomfortable little group weighted down by Abe’s gigantic presence: he lay athwart them like the wreck of a galleon, dominating with his presence his own weakness and self-indulgence, his narrowness and bitterness. All of them were conscious of the solemn dignity that flowed from him, of his achievement, fragmentary, suggestive and surpassed. But they were frightened at his survivant will, once a will to live, now become a will to die.
However, everything had happened—Abe’s departure and Mary’s impending departure for Salzburg this afternoon had ended the time in Paris. Or perhaps the shots, the concussions that had finished God knew what dark matter, had terminated it. The shots had entered into all their lives: echoes of violence followed them out onto the pavement where two porters held a post-mortem beside them as they waited for a taxi.
His work became confused with Nicole’s problems; in addition, her income had increased so fast of late that it seemed to belittle his work.
“We must think it over carefully—” and the unsaid lines back of that: “We own you, and you’ll admit it sooner or later. It is absurd to keep up the pretence of independence.”
For what might occur thereafter she had no anxiety—she suspected that that would be the lifting of a burden, an unblinding of eyes. Nicole had been designed for change, for flight, with money as fins and wings. The new state of things would be no more than if a racing chassis, concealed for years under the body of a family limousine, should be stripped to its original self. Nicole could feel the fresh breeze already—the wrench it was she feared, and the dark manner of its coming.
On an almost parallel occasion, back in Dohmler’s clinic on the Zürichsee, realizing this power, he had made his choice, chosen Ophelia, chosen the sweet poison and drunk it. Wanting above all to be brave and kind, he had wanted, even more than that, to be loved. So it had been.
Perhaps, so she liked to think, his career was biding its time, again like Grant’s in Galena; his latest note was postmarked from Hornell, New York, which is some distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any case he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another.
