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Example research essay topic: Relationship With Tommy Barban Relationship With Tommy Nicole - 1,113 words

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The Triumph of Nature over Civilization: The Disintegration of Dick Diver The exact nature of Dick Divers descent throughout the course of Tender is the Night is difficult to discern. It is clear enough that his disintegration is occasioned by Nicole's burgeoning independence, but why or how her transformation affects him this way is less than obvious. Moreover, it is not at all apparent what is at stake, more abstractly, in this reciprocal exchange of fates. In this paper, I will propose a reading of this change that relates Nicole's strength to her naturalness, her identification with instinct and natural impulse, and Dicks strength to his civilization, his identification with the curtailment of natural impulse through psychiatry 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 novels end to impulse and instinct, but while Nicole does this by gaining an independent self-consciousness, Dick achieves this only through drinking.

Throughout the novel Nicole is identified with the childish and anomalistic wildness of instinct. This is most obvious in the uninhibited expression of emotion that 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. She laughed as after some mild escape of childhood" (192). And as a patient at the clinic, after having her affection for Dick rebuffed, we are told, "Nicole's world had fallen to pieces, but it was only a flimsy and scarcely created world; 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 sense 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 tangible expression of an appetite to possess and control. Money becomes more and more plentiful 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 care of goods, was an absorption in itself. The style in which they traveled was fabulous" (257).

Nicole's relation to impulse is also demonstrated by her attractions to others, culminating, of course, in her relationship with Tommy Barban. Fitzgerald tells us, for instance, "the people she liked, rebels mostly, disturbed her and were bad for her - she sought in them the vitality that had made them independent or creative or rugged, sought in vain - for their secrets were buried deep in childhood struggles they had forgotten" (180). It was this raw vitality that Dick increasingly lacked (he was far from rugged and becomes less and less creative through the course of the novel) and Nicole saw his missing vigor in herself which than became the focus of her external interest. Her search for this energy in others was an expression of her own growing awareness of this energy within herself. I think it is noteworthy, as well, that Fitzgerald links this energy to childhood struggles. If the source of such interior strength is the experience of childhood, then perhaps Nicole's difficulty in finding this within her can be explained by the fact that she has not left childhood.

For much of the novel, she is still Dicks surrogate daughter and has yet to extricate herself from that role. One might also use this fact to explain her poor relation with her own children who seem, on the whole, more mature than she. How could she be a mother to children when she is a child herself? Near the end of the novel, this identification of Nicole with instinct becomes more explicit. For example, we are told "Nicole had been designed for change, for flight, with money as fins and wings" (280).

Freedom is her nature, but it is a freedom likened to that of animals. Wildness is inherent in her, an unconstrained passion for movement. Fitzgerald continues in the next line, "the new state of things would be no more than if a racing chassis, concealed for years under the body of a family limousine, should be stripped to its original self" (280). Again, an unruly, passionate, and impulsive object represents Nicole.

The culmination of Nicole's growing awareness of the wildness of her nature is her relationship with Tommy Barban. The exchange between her and Tommy in their impulsively procured hotel room is very illuminating in this regard. Tommy asks her pointedly, "Why didnt they leave you in a natural state? , " following up with, "You are the most dramatic person I have ever known... All this taming of women!" (293). Nicole stays silent through most of this, feeling "Dicks ghost prompting at her elbow, " but refusing to pay it heed, listens instead to Tommys exposition of her nature.

In the end she accepts his understanding of her as her own, endorsing his impulsive naturalness with her own and "welcom[ing] the anarchy of her lover" (298). Dicks path is decidedly different. Throughout the first half of the book, Dick is presented in a very positive light. He is handsome and charismatic, the center of his social world.

We are told, "save among a few of the tough-minded and perennially suspicious, he had the power of arousing a fascinating and uncritical love" (27). Due to peoples affection for him, he becomes the head of his social group. He is shown very much in control of his environment. We learn later that Dick is a psychiatrist with a brilliant mind who, if he could only organize his thoughts on paper, would lead to great advances in the subject. For all the emotional attachment he engenders in others, he himself (except for aspects of his relationship with Rosemary, which we know is new for him) is not given to emotional excess.

As a friend of his says, "You are not a romantic philosopher - youre a scientist. Memory, force, character" (117). Dicks role as a scientist is not, however, impersonal observation. He is a clinical psychiatrist and works to bring those who are mentally disturbed back to the "normal" social world. It is in this capacity that he first meets Nicole.

She is a patient, and it is his charge to alleviate her hysteria. In this regard, he must curtail the excesses of impulse and emotion that preclude her functioning according to social convention. She is wild, and he must...


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