Tender is the Night Time Quotes

The first sentence of this passage had to be omitted when the novel was revised, according to his notes, after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s death. Would the contrast between Dick at 34 and Dick at 28 seem too stark if we didn’t see the older Dick first? Does the novel’s chronology disorient us in a way that helps us understand the novel, or does it seem like a cheap trick with no real purpose?

Nicole is referring to the time she’s been ill – probably from the moment her father raped her to when she starts to feel recovered five years later. Does Nicole ever get back the time she’s lost?

As far as we know, Nicole hasn’t seen her father in like ten years. Dick keeps asking if he’s dead because he’s terrified of what seeing her father will do to Nicole. Suddenly ten years doesn’t seem like such a long time, does it?

This passage is stunning. Look at where we are in the novel. Look at what we’ve been through. It seems like a lot longer than two weeks. Part of this is because the chronology we started of with in the summer of 1925 picks right back up again after taking us back to when Nicole and Dick met, around six years before.

Did this part give you goose bumps? It’s the end of Nicole’s first person section. It starts from when she and Dick first meet and ends back where the novel itself began, on the beach in 1925.

Dick is traveling back in time here. He’s humming the song that was playing in the background when he called Rosemary after he missed her at the studio that day five years ago. This passage shows how music holds memories. Nothing new there, but this is definitely fun to think about.

This is a nice moment, if you are interested in time. What is does it mean that Dick is listening to time? Is he running against the clock? Is he trying to stay "in time." Moments before this, he was thinking that "[h]is work [has become] confused with Nicole’s problems," and that all her money makes his work seem insignificant. If he can understand time, perhaps he can find the time to work again. An enigmatic passage, but it highlights the importance of time to the novel.

This one is interesting because it shows that Dick going back in someone else’s time – Rosemary’s to be exact. When Collis Clay tells Dick that story about Rosemary and another guy in a train compartment, Dick becomes even more passionate about her. He keeps imagining her experience several years before.

The word would is interesting here. It reminds us that the novel (except for some of Nicole’s section) is written in the past tense. Even though it seems like there is a definite past and a definite present in the novel, the whole thing takes place in the past. Everything is already known to the narrator, including what Dick will do in the future.

We lose sight of Devereux pretty much right after this. He’s been banished and only turns up again in the flesh briefly when he’s supposedly on his death bed. Yet,, once we meet him he never really leaves the novel. He is the past that haunts everything.