Tender Is the Night: Book 2, Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

It’s 1917 when Doctor Richard Diver, age 26, moves from America to Switzerland. Dick had been “too much of a capital investment” to be sent off to fight in World War I. Instead, he is to complete his medical studies in Zurich. Dick had already “seen around the edges of the war” during his time as an Oxford Rhodes Scholar; he had been in Vienna when it “was old with death.” Nonetheless, the war had never really touched him directly. Later, Dick would reflect that these “war-time years in Europe had been the “favorite” and “heroic” period of his life.

Throughout 1917, it becomes more difficult for Dick to find coal, and he resorts to burning “almost a hundred textbooks” to stay warm, ensuring first that he has read and digested all the books’ contents.

Sharing an apartment with Ed Elkins—“second secretary at the Embassy”—Dick is disturbed by the idea that “the quality of his mental processes” might not be all that different from Ed’s, a man he considers simple. Dick ponders that “he must be less in tact” than all “these clever men.” Dick’s time in Zurich is founded on many illusions: “the illusions of eternal strength and health, and of the goodness of people—illusions of a nation.”

After completing his degree, Dick receives orders to join the war effort by supporting a neurological unit in Bar-sur-Aube, France. He is disgusted, however, to find that his work is largely “executive rather than practical.” Discharged in 1919, he returns to Zurich, having completed a short textbook. The narrator admits that it might be unsettling to encounter this unfamiliar representation of Dick in his youth and suggests to the reader that Dick Diver’s “moment” is about to begin.