F. Scott Fitzgerald

This chapter overviews how Fitzgerald’s war writing was refracted through his evolution as a writer, from The Side of Paradise—his chaotic and immature debut novel—through his experimentations with naturalism in The Beautiful and Damned, to the ambiguous portrayal he gives of World War I in The Great Gatsby. Tender Is the Night, while more stylistically mature than Fitzgerald’s first novel, I argue, revisits many of the representational strategies explored in his debut. Like Boyd, Fitzgerald’s World War I-related projects were caught up in his commercially necessitated magazine fiction and spells in Hollywood.

An Evening on Mars

Chapter 35 begins with the Red Planet success of Pathfinder and the Mars rover Sojourner, and continues with Bradbury’s hosting of NASA’s 1998 Thomas O. Paine Memorial Award ceremony under the title “Witness & Celebrate: An Evening on Mars with Ray Bradbury.” Distinguished film actors, including Nichelle Nichols, John Rhys-Davies, and Charlton Heston, read from ten Bradbury works. The chapter also discusses “The Affluence of Despair,” Bradbury’s Jeremiad against America’s obsession with self-performance and extreme media reporting, which he likened to the world he had tried to prevent in Fahrenheit 451. The chapter closes with an analysis of Bradbury’s love for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, and what this love reveals about his ability to fend off the worst effects of fame.

Dissolving Subjectivities: Imagined Selves in F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Keats

This chapter argues that sympathetic ambivalence is the hallmark of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mode of narration (for instance, exemplified in The Great Gatsby (1925) by Nick Carraway’s curious ambivalence towards the subject of his narration, Jay Gatsby). Paradoxically, Fitzgerald portrays subjectivity as involved in both an intimate immediacy from within and an incisive viewpoint marshalled from without. Fitzgerald’s narrative technique – one of empathetic engagement and critical distance – constitutes a form of Keats’s negatively capable poetics. Fitzgerald’s negatively capable poetics depict a process of self-dissolution which reconfigures the relationship between inner and outer identities, as well as the dynamics between self and world. Such fictions of the self, for Fitzgerald, are paradoxically a release from and an imposition on subjectivities (as played out through Dick Diver’s dilemma in Tender is the Night (1934)) and the environs they occupy.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night Cons and Pros of the Narrative Method and Technique

Most critics tackle Fitzgerald's works thematically, whereas what distinguishes his fictional narratives is his magnificent style, suggestive language and innovative narrative methods and techniques. This is quite evident in The Great Gatsby and other pieces like The Last Tycoon, "The Mountain as Big as the Ritz", the autobiographical piece The Crack Up, etc. Tender is the Night is among these masterpieces which is our major concern in this paper. Yet still, this novel witnessed some controversial issues in its narrative technique and method. The study of the narrative method and technique in Tender is the Night has no less significance in the literary world than it has in The Great Gatsby. In fact, Fitzgerald mounted his artistic maturity and craftsmanship in this novel despite all the controversial issues that surrounded the novel's first publication. The present study sheds light on the cons and pros of the narrative technique and method in both versions of Tender is the Night with necessary reference to the development of the events in the novel.

A Topsy-Turvy Novel: “Coloring Gestures” in Tender Is the Night

This essay addresses the black presence in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) not simply as an episode but as the very backbone of the plot. Inserting Fitzgerald into an unexpected lineage that originates with James Weldon Johnson and moves to Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison, it argues that Fitzgerald shares with these writers a complex fusion of racial disorder, musical contagion, and intergenerational rivalry. Like Johnson and Reed, Fitzgerald also uses the figure of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Topsy to announce the various permutations of race in the novel and to uncover the white characters’ fear of miscegenation and incest. Tender Is the Night is a “topsy-turvy” novel because of the dynamic patterning of black and white imagery Fitzgerald employs to reveal the slippery racial surface of the 1920s.

Decorating the Performative Body in Tender Is the Night

In Tender Is the Night (1934), Fitzgerald uses clothing and fashion to heighten the sense of time period as well as to enhance the ways in which the world, on both sides of the Atlantic, was changing. However, changes on the surface frequently do not reveal a change in underlying motivations for dress. In Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald uses clothing in symbolic ways that allow characters to perform roles to achieve their goals. Through the ways bodies are shaped in the novel, Fitzgerald reveals that clothing, shopping, and perfectly bronzed skin have the power to make great economic statements about oneself. Additionally, clothing in Tender Is the Night demonstrates ways in which traditional gender roles and stereotypes were changing during the modernist era. Though many things had changed during the 1920s, characters continued to use their bodies as blank tablets upon which to write, enacting powerful and purposeful performances that always have rhetorical ends. Fitzgerald’s use of clothing in Tender Is the Night reflects the way that clothing, particularly for those abroad, had the power to demonstrate societal changes in gender roles as well as social class.