Fitzgerald’s “Hero” in “Tender Is the Night” Dissertation

F. Scott Fitzgerald effectively humanized the characters in his novels to fit the cultural psyche. His characters were not painted in black or white, as was seen in early pre-modern novels. Instead, they were full of humane follies, ego, and desire. Some of them had a dark secret while others were neurotic. Fitzgerald broke the moralising nature of literary characters that were essentially good like Melanie or bad like Scarlet in Gone with the Wind. Instead, his characters were sparkled with the vicissitudes of human oddities, self-centred, and individualistic. Protagonists of Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night reverberate on the dark side of human folly. They are upright people who have succumbed to some kind of imprudence that smeared their whole existence. The dark episodes of the protagonist’s life dictate their whole existence. This darkness of their life creates the hero, or rather the anti-hero of Fitzgerald’s novel. This essay analyses the hero-figure of the novel Tender is the Night and strives to understand how successfully Fitzgerald created an archetypical hero in the modern context retaining some of the classical characters of a romantic hero.

The hero in literature is usually characterized as a white male belonging to the aristocracy. He begins his journey, performs a heroic deed, then he successfully returns or embraces death. He may have been born under unusual circumstances. He is usually altruistic in nature and shows a desire for personal glory and fame. The hero either embraces great victories or dies a terrible death. Fitzgerald created such an archetypical hero (or anti-hero) in his novels.

Tender is divided into three books. Book 1 opens in the French Riviera where Rosemary Hoyt meets the flamboyant Divers. This book ends as Nicole Diver collapses on the floor of her bathroom. Book 2 is a walk back into the memory lane, with Dick Diver narrating the story of his and Nicole’s meeting in a sanatorium where Nicole was being treated, their love affair, marriage and ultimately the rift in their wedded life. Book 3 relates the breakage in their marriage with Dick’s affair with Rosemary and Nicole’s with another man whom she ultimately marries while Dick is reinstated as a doctor in an obscure village. In this book, the voice of Nicole becomes stronger as Dick fades away. The reverberating theme in the novel Tender is the Night is incestuous relation that dominates all the relations and the characters of the novel. The predominance of the incestuous relation between Nicole and her father affected the two main protagonists of the novel Nicole Warren Diver and Dick Diver.

Fitzgerald’s novels eclipsed the modern tension of the meaninglessness of life. The complexity of life becomes acute with Fitzgerald and his characters become “victims of their own goodness” (Shunnaq 89). However, the juxtaposition of the cultures and the oddities of modern life shatter all romantic imagination. However, Fitzgerald was able to retain his romantic ideal with a mix of realism in his novels. Tender is his last study in the “heroic decadence” of his protagonist (Shunnaq 183).

Dick Diver is an intelligent and charming doctor practicing psychiatry at Dr. Dohmler’s clinic at Zurich. He assists the doctor with a demented patient named Nicole Warner, with whom he eventually becomes emotionally involved. The hero falls in love, marries her, and martyrs his life to cure her. At the end of the novel, Nicole emerges as a phoenix, rising from her own ashes, laden with rejuvenated strength, while the hero obliterates to an obscure, nameless village. The story of Dick Diver is that of a quest, his quest to save a girl whom he believes could be saved only with his love. However, in his quest for success, he looses his way into obscurity, removing himself from a demanding career of a psychiatrist with a patient-wife, into a life of money and leisure. The story of Dick is a story of an anti-heroic profligacy. Dick recoils into himself, and in the end completely disassociates himself from the social scene.

In the beginning of the novel, he emerges as a young, attractive man, with Irish roots. His handsome countenance is at length, described in the novel and his character is described with illustrious heroic libretti like self-sacrifice, enthusiasm, self-discipline, and social etiquette. Initially portrayed as a zealous careerist, Dick dwindles in the passion of one patient, and faces his demise. The hero of Tender lives in a fantasy. When he meets Nicole, he believes that the cure for her insecurity is his love and marriage with her. Thus, he creates a fantastical family of the Divers, the image of which breaks as Nicole has a breakdown in the bathroom.

Through the process of Nicole’s treatment, we come to know about her tormented childhood and the reason for her mental breakdown. When the doctor interrogates Nicole’s father and asks him to recount from the beginning, he says, “there isn’t any beginning” (Fitzgerald 126). He recounts how he has been both father and mother to his daughters. After their mother died, he himself was baffled, at what may have caused the sexual paranoia in Nicole. However, a conscious interruption of the narration results in his expressing the true story. He relates, “It just happened … We were just like lovers – and then all at once we were lovers” (Fitzgerald 129). The elderly Mr. Warren almost resembles Humbert of Nabokov’s Lolita where the latter says, “It was she who had seduced me” (Nabokov 132).

Dick’s belief that his love is the actual cure for Nicole shows a selfless act. However, his fantasy disintegrates and he becomes unstable, broken from reality, when he is imprisoned and he confesses to have raped an infant. Nicole, on the other had, watching Dick interact with their children is faced with the reality and breaks from her attachment to the “father”. She decides to act the part of an adulteress to the father, and rejects him to form a ‘real’ marriage (Cokal 86). With the emotional separation that arises between Dick and his wife, begins his downfall as a hero. His sacrifice for Nicole is dissolved in meaninglessness, and he drifts away into obscurity while Nicole rises to a new life (Cokal 89).

Dick’s decision to undertake the care of Nicole marks the beginning of his romantic heroic quest. Nicole, affected by an incestuous past was looking for a father figure to look after her, whom she finds in Dick. On the other hand, Dick determined to treat this patient, with whom he feels emotionally involved, even though he is aware of the downsides of such a husband-nurse relationship on their marriage (Shunnaq 191).

The rise of the anti-hero in Fitzgerald’s novel is apparent. It is the hero, handsome, charming, and ambitious, ventures out on a romantic journey, in order to save a tormented patient from a dysfunctional childhood, but eventually ruins himself in pursuit of his quest. Nicole is shown as a victim of an incestuous liaison, but eventually she revivifies as a survivor. She derives her strength to revive her life through dick’s demise. Fitzgerald shows the demise of the hero due to his over-zealous mission as a redeemer.

References

Cokal, Susann. “Caught in the Wrong Story: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Structure in Tender Is the Night.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 47.1 (2005): 75-100. Print.

Fitzgerald, Scott F. Tender is the Night. New York: Random House, 2001. Print.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: Vintage House, 1997. Print.

Shunnaq, Susanne Ramadan. The Trasitional Epic Hero in American Literature: Alger, Fitzgerals, and the Philosophy of Success. Ann Abor: Bell and Hovell, 2000. Print.