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

The Disintegration of bill Diver in Tender is the night   The exact nature of tool Diver¹s descent throughout the course of Tender is the Night is difficult to discern. It is clear enough that his disintegration is occasi whizd by Nicole¹s burgeoning independence, plainly why or how her transformation affects him this way is slight than obvious. Moreover, it is not at all apparent what is at stake, more abstractly, in this reciprocal diversify of fates. In this paper, I will propose a reading of this transmute that relates Nicole¹s strength to her naturalness, her identification with instinct and natural nerve impulse, and Dick¹s strength to his civilization, his identification with the curtailment of natural impulse through psychopathology and prewar American civilization. The relationship between Nicole and Dick is such that what happens to the one must happen to the other. Both Nicole and Dick turn by the refreshing¹s end to impulse and instinct, but while Nicole does this by gaining an free-living 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 bearing 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 laughing hilariously, unashamed, unafraid, unconcerned&352.She laughed as afterwards some mild escape of childhood (192). And as a affected role at the clinic, after having her affection for Dick rebuffed, we are told, Nicole¹s humanity had fallen to pieces, but it was only a flimsy and scarcely created human race beneath it her emotions and instincts fought on (143). As the story progresses, though, the expression of these impulses become less openly dangerous and abnormal and more linked to her growing perceive of self. One more restrained way in which Nicole is identified with impulse is her use of money. Money in the story is a sort of materialized passion, the conspicuous expression of an appetite to possess and control. Money becomes more and more big 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 administer of goods, was an absorption in itself. The style in which they traveled was fabulous (257).