Tender Is The Night Theme Essay

Loss as a Literary Theme In the book Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, there were two themes that presented themselves throughout the book more so than some other themes. Love was widely presented and in many different ways. The love for a child, the love for a wife as a lover and friend, and a love for a girl that transformed from a fatherly love to something more than it ever should have been. Loss was the other theme presented in Tender is the Night. Loss was also presented in a variety of ways. One of the main characters, Nicole, has a psychotic episode towards the end of the first third of the book. Dick, her husband, begins to distance himself from her and turns to alcohol instead, and in turn, Nicole too, drifts away from her husband and finds a new love. One can learn from this book that “Loss of another can too quickly lead to the loss of oneself. Numerous instances really showed the theme of loss. One can find that it wasn’t necessarily the loss of someone close to the character through death, but much rather through spirit. In the first third of the book, towards the end of the chapter, a man was murdered in Rosemary’s room(Rosemary is the other major

Nicole ended up getting fed up with him and divorced him for another man. Dick moves to America permanently and becomes extremely depressed and dives deeper into alcoholism. After taking a deeper look at what the loss of another can do to oneself, and what it did to Dick, one can connect this theme to the real world and how the death of another, or the falling out of friends really can affect a person. They end up becoming someone they’re not, and then trying to cover it up with activities such as new lovers, alcohol, and drugs. To conclude, “the loss of another can too quickly lead to the loss of oneself” is shown in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book Tender is the Night, you just have to know where to find