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Book 1, Chapter 12
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
While visiting a memorial at a World War I battlefield in Somme, northern France, Dick leads Rosemary around, teaching her things about the war. Abe and Dick disagree about whether there could ever be another World War, with the latter declaring “no Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.” Dick mourns that “all my beautiful safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high-explosive love.” Rosemary sobs in front of one memorial—“Like most women she liked to be told how she should feel,” and she enjoys when Dick tells her “which things were ludicrous and which things were sad.”
When Fitzgerald finished writing Tender is the Night in 1934, it would have been impossible for him to know that a second war was soon to devastate the world once again. Perhaps Fitzgerald intended for Dick’s hopeful optimism—that “no Europeans will ever do that again in this generation”—to be inspiring and assuring. Certainly the post-war generation wanted to believe that World War I had been the “war to end all wars,” and many would have taken comfort in Dick’s confident innocence. This passage is drenched in sexist gender dynamics, with men associated with war and heroism, while women are reduced to helpless emotional hysterics and need to be directed by men.
Themes
Before leaving, they spot a girl they’d met earlier on the train, and she’s still carrying a wreath. Unable to find her brother’s grave, she follows Dick’s advice to just place the wreath on a random grave. Rosemary cries at the woman’s story as they all drive together to Amiens.
Once again, Dick’s calm confidence and firm assuredness are gifts to those around him, particularly the women. He is an emblem of American values and good manners.
Themes
The party explores Amiens together, a town that’s “still sad from the war.” Surrounded by “smoke and chatter and music” they clap along to a live band, before catching the train back to Paris. Nicole frets restlessly while reading guidebooks about the battlefield. In contrast, Dick oversimplifies the war “until it [bears] a faint resemblance to one of his own parties.”
Fitzgerald juxtaposes the cheerful spirit and optimism of the Jazz Age with the dark mood of war that still hung over Europe at this time. The post-war generation, haunted by the horrors of World War I, searched for ways to forget the past and look forward to a brighter future. Here, the live band in Amiens, a town “still sad from the war,” vividly symbolizes the murky transition between wartime and peacetime.
Themes
