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Book 1, Chapter 22
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
Abe is drunk in the Ritz bar, where he’s been all morning. In between chatting with the waiters and calling Dick and Nicole, Abe’s mind returns occasionally to Freeman—the man who has been falsely accused of stealing from him, and who remains in prison. He thinks that “he ought to go over and get Freeman out of jail,” but Abe puts “the nightmare” out of his mind.
Again, the carelessness with which Fitzgerald’s characters treat Freeman, a falsely-imprisoned black man, epitomizes the rampant racism of the 1920s. Abe is far more concerned with his immediate surroundings than the life or future of somebody he deems inferior to him.
Themes
Abe stays in the bar well into the afternoon, contented by the sensation of the past merging into present, and the present into future. A waiter announces that “a colored fellow of the name Jules Peterson” has arrived in search of Abe. Upon learning that Peterson is not allowed to enter, Abe drags himself out of the bar to meet him.
The fact that Peterson, a black man, is not allowed to enter the bar reflects the racist attitudes and policies of the era. Abe has drunk himself into a stupor, and it’s only with Jules’s arrival that Abe musters the strength to leave his bar stool.
Themes
