Title: Tender is the Night
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Pages: 315
Date of Original Publication: 1934
Topic: Theme

Tender is the Night is the last novel F. Scott Fitzgerald completed.The novel has many themes but the one seen throughout is decay and destruction. The story is about a young actress, Rosemary Hoyt, who goes to the French Rivera for a vacation. While in the French Rivera she meets Dick, a psychiatrist, and his mentally unstable wife, Nicole. After meeting one another, Rosemary and Dick fall in love. After Dick and Rosemary begin their affair, Dick's life begins to deteriorate. He starts to drink excessive amounts of alcohol, is accused of sleeping with a young patient, and risks everything he lives for. He risks everything he holds dear to him such as his social life, his seemingly perfect marriage, and even his job. His lust for women and his alcoholism ruins his entire life. The novel comes to a close with Dick pursuing a new life in New York. Passion and lust are two of the main sources of destruction in Tender is the Night. First of all, passion starts to ruin the perfect marriage of the Diver's when Rosemary and Dick begin to fall in love. Ultimately the two falling in love turns into an affair. Honestly, Dick was ashamedof the affair because rather than being in love with Rosemary he is in love with the thought of being with someone who was mentally stable. He feels terrible about his entire affair with Rosemary also because he is still in love with Nicole. He feels the urge to love Nicole because she was mentally ill. One passage states, "he had a sense of guilt as one of those nightmares where we are accused of a crime which we recognize as something undeniable experienced, but which upon waking we realize we have not committed," (p. 190) when it comes to the way Dick felt about the affair. Rosemary is not the only girl that Dick has an affair with. Throughout the course novel, when Dick indulges in alcohol, he tries to get with many women on several occasions. His lust for other women even goes to the extent of trying to sleep with one of his young female patients during one of their sessions. Dick is not the only one in the Diver family that has an affair. His wife, Nicole, has an affair with Tommy Barban after she finds out about all of the women Dick has been with during their marriage. The affair that angers her the most is the young patient. Finding out about that attempted affair leads Nicole to have an affair with Tommy Barban. Both affairs ultimately end up destroying the marriage and the couple decides to get a divorce. Dick's wife, Nicole, is mentally unstable and that poses as a source of destruction. Nicole was raped by her father when she was just a child and that left her mentally scarred for the rest of her life. Under certain situations and stressful times she goes into fits of rage and mood swings. Her fits of anger and mood swings push her loving husband further away from her. Nicole's mental unstableness is first shown when she starts writing letters to Dick. The letters indicate that she is not "all there." The letters in the begging are random babbles such as,"However you seem quieter than the others, all soft like a big cat. I have only gotten tol like boys who are rather sissies. Are you a sissy?"(Page 121) Later Nicole starts sending letters that suggest a shift in the way that she thinks. Towards the end of the novel Nicole's anger gets the best of her and she goes on a rampage when she finds out about the young patient Dick was fond of. Needless to say, her anger and mental capacity helped destroy the Diver family. While under the influence of alcohol, some people tend to get aggressive and that is especially true for the males in this novel. One of the first instances of this is when Albert McKisco, a writer from America, gets into an argument with Tommy Barban. Their argument ends with Albert challenging Tommy to a duel. Right before the duel a passage