Tender is the Night Analysis

Literary Devices in Tender is the Night

Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory

We found this little passage to be confusing: "Dick Diver came and brought with him a fine glowing surface on which the three women sprang like monkeys with cries of relief, perching on his shoulde...

Setting

This map of France helps us understand the setting of Tender is the Night. Look at the far right corner of the map. That’s the fabulous French Riviera, kids. See Cannes? Go west, up the coast...

Narrator Point of View

For the most part, the third person narrator of Tender is the Night occupies the points of view of Dick Diver, Nicole Diver, and Rosemary Hoyt, though it slips from time to time into many of the ot...

Genre

Tender is the Night is a modernist classic. Modernism as a literary movement was largely a reaction to World War I. The horror of war on a global scale was beyond the scope of the imaginations of t...

Tone

As we discuss in the "The Book," this novel took about eight years to write and was laboriously revised and cut from many thousands of pages of writing to the 300 some odd pages that we have before...

Writing Style

That’s a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald in an undated letter to his daughter. We think it’s a useful way to describe his writing style. We’ll look at a sentence and see if it hold...

What’s Up With the Title?

The title is taken from the fourth stanza of John Keats’s famous poem, "Ode to A Nightingale." Several lines from the verse also function as the novel’s epigraph, which we discuss in Sh...

What’s Up With the Epigraph?

"Already with thee! tender is the night.… But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blownThrough verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways."– Ode to a Nighting...

What’s Up With the Ending?

The action of the novel stops in the summer of 1930. The ending though, in three brief paragraphs, gives us a very distant glimpse of what happens to a few characters some unspecified years into th...

Plot Analysis

Lifestyles of the rich and famous.It is 1925 and we find the glam couple psychiatrist Dick Diver and obscenely wealthy Nicole Diver, formerly Warren, and their pre-kindergarten son and daughter,...

Booker's Seven Basic Plots Analysis

First Love…To fit Tender is the Night into a Christopher Booker model, we must do what Walter Cowley did to the novel after its author’s death – put it in chronological order (See "The Book...

Three Act Plot Analysis

The narrative is non-linear, and begins on a beach in the French Riviera in 1925, but the first act of Tender is the Night spans from just before the death of the mother of incredibly wealthy and...

Trivia

Steaminess Rating

We almost hesitate to give this an R, as there the sex in this book is not explicit. On the other hand, sex is everywhere. Often the romantic scenes that lead up to it are all we get, other than va...

Allusions

James Joyce, Ulysses (1.2.27)Le Temps (1.3.26)The Saturday Evening Post (1.3.26)The New York Herald (1.4.18)Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1.10.45)Lewis Carroll (1.13.10.)Jules Gabriel Verne (1.13....