Tender is the Night Characters

Dick Diver is a dominant figure in Tender is the Night. He’s a pretty shifty character, and by "shifty" we mean shifting, changing, and hard to get a fix on. Is he a playboy, a brilliant psyc...

Nicole’s mental illness permeates everything. Her world is torn apart when she’s a young teenager. Her mother had just died, and her father, Devereux Warren, whom she adored, raped her....

Tommy is a truly fascinating character. He brings forth the idea of duality of the novel, representing both destruction and repair. Before he and Nicole become lovers, he is a professional soldier...

Starlet Rosemary Hoyt is a mysterious and glamorous figure in the novel. The more we examine her, the more complicated she seems. She’s the young and beautiful movie star, traveling the globe...

We feel a bit conflicted about Elsie Speers. As we discuss in Rosemary's "Character Analysis," Rosemary certainly loves Elsie. She has helped Rosemary break into acting, which Rosemary enjoys and w...

Devereux's Dark SideDevereux is Nicole’s father. He raped her when she was somewhere between the ages of eleven and thirteen, just after her mother died (Devereux says she was eleven when her...

Baby Warren is portrayed as a rather cold woman, insulated from the world by her wealth. Baby is rarely humanized in the novel, mostly because she dehumanizes those around her. It’s hard to f...

The Diver children’s roles in the novel are sparse, but their presences underscore the tragic themes. Lanier is the older of the children, and is described in one place as being an "unpredict...

Nicole fell into a terrible madness after Topsy’s birth, though there is no indication that the same thing happened when Lanier was born. It’s safe to imagine that Nicole was afraid for...

At the beginning of the novel Albert is something of an annoying pest. He walks around feeling inferior and butting heads with everyone. When we hear from his wife that he’s trying to write a...

Violet remains somewhat irritating throughout the novel, but has the important distinction of being the first person (outside of Dick, Tommy, and her family) to see Nicole’s mental illness. W...

When we first meet Abe, he seems to be doing OK. He seems to be a stable contrast to the volatility of Tommy Barban. But over the course of the first two weeks of the novel he goes down hill, fast....

Dick thinks Mary’s an opportunist for marrying a wealthy man so soon after Abe’s death. But she’s also the last person we see him talking to before he leaves town. After the dirty...

Dick’s eventual partner in the clinic, Franz, is one of the people who knows Nicole’s background. He never had Dick’s ambition, but manages to become fairly successful by living a...

Kaethe is Franz’s wife and is hard to like. Dick thinks that she’s a "cauliflower" when he meets her. And Nicole won’t let her kids play with Topsy and Lanier. Nicole is always fl...

We don’t see much of him, but he’s important because he owns the clinic before Dick and Franz buy it and he diagnoses Nicole. Dick respects him but sees him as part of "the ghostly gene...

Collis is Rosemary’s friend, and he’s essentially following her around. He’s there to witness Dick’s big break-down, and helps Baby when she’s trying to get Dick out o...