Tender Is the Night

As expats from America to Europe after World War I, Dick and Nicole’s travels resemble, at least externally, the same movements of the Lost Generation group of artists to which Fitzgerald belonged (See: Background). Typically, the Lost Generation writers capitalized on themes of life’s futility and emptiness. Tender Is the Night touches upon this sentiment in a specific way with regard to Dick’s career as a psychologist.

In a way, Dick’s efforts as a psychiatrist to Nicole represent a specific flavor of post-war rehabilitation methodology. Nicole has suffered her own individual trauma, not immediately related to the conflict of World War I but devastating enough to match. Later in the book, Dick himself suffers a sudden, uncontrollable, traumatic experience in the loss of his father. Both come into the story as ultimately unresolvable upsets to the human experience. There is no remedy for Nicole in therapy, even though Dick and the other doctors work very hard in searching for effective treatment. Nicole’s deeply internalized insecurity flares up in mental health episodes across the span of the narrative; she is never completely safe from the damaging effects of hurt and war and violence that characterize the norm of this life and this world. Ironically, Dick the psychiatrist turns to alcohol as a coping mechanism for dealing with his pain, already realizing that the promise of psychoanalytical rehabilitation cannot deliver its promised results.

The span of Dick’s career as a therapist in the novel also illustrates the theme of futility in psychotherapeutic methods. His early ambitions remain unrealized: His book never gains the popular and critical traction he had hoped for, and his efforts at the Swiss clinic with Franz Gregorovius also end in shameful, alcoholism-fueled termination. One scene in particular, that of the suffering woman in Book 2, Chapter 14, demonstrates this theme. While Dick tries to treat her, he develops guilt over talking to her as a patient while she is suffering, beginning to see the futility of formulaic psychological approaches to real human pain. To Dick, such approaches feel inauthentic and even wrong, a sentiment that grows stronger once she dies. These moments in the story suggest that human life is so constituted that some pains go too deep for standard, systematic regimens of therapy. Just as the Lost Generation artists criticized the glossy emptiness and superficiality of American consumerist culture in the 1920s, Fitzgerald criticizes the psychiatric industry as being tragically ineffective in the face of existential—and perhaps ultimately insoluble—problems.