Disintegration of Dick Diver in Fitzgeralds Tender is the Night Essays :: Tender is the Night Essays

The Disintegration of puppet Diver in Tender is the darkness   The exact nature of puppet Diver¹s descent end-to-end the course of Tender is the Night is difficult to discern. It is clear enough that his profligacy is occasioned by Nicole¹s burgeoning independence, simply why or how her transformation affects him this expressive style is less than unadorned. Moreover, it is not at all apparent what is at stake, to a greater extent abstractly, in this reciprocal exchange of fates. In this paper, I will see a reading of this change that relates Nicole¹s strength to her internalness, her identification with inherent aptitude and natural impulse, and Dick¹s strength to his civilization, his identification with the curtailment of natural impulse through psychiatry and prewar American civilization. The relationship surrounded by Nicole and Dick is such that what happens to the one must happen to the other. Both Nicole and Dick turn by the novel¹s end to impulse and instinct, but while Nicole does this by gaining an independent self-consciousness, Dick achieves this only through drinking. throughout the novel Nicole is identified with the childish and animalistic wildness of instinct. This is most obvious in the uninhibited expression of emotion which characterizes her episodes of madness. We see, for instance, her frenzied laughter as she rides the Ferris wheel and causes her car to crash. As the car finally comes to a halt, she, Nicole, was express joy hilariously, unashamed, unafraid, unconcerned&352.She laughed as after some mild escape of puerility (192). And as a patient at the clinic, after having her affection for Dick rebuffed, we are told, Nicole¹s world had fallen to pieces, but it was only a flimsy and scarcely created world beneath it her emotions and instincts fought on (143). As the level progresses, though, the expression of these impulses become less openly dangerous and abnormal and more linked to her grow ing sense of self. One more restrained track in which Nicole is identified with impulse is her use of money. property in the accounting is a sort of materialized passion, the tangible expression of an appetite to possess and control. Money becomes more and more plentiful as the story moves on, such that by the beginning of book three, after Dick gives up his stake in the clinic, the mere spending of it, money, the care of goods, was an absorption in itself. The style in which they traveled was fabulous (257).