Tender is the Night: The Historical Configuration of the Failure of the American Dream

Abstract

Tender is the Night is F. Scott Fitzgerald's fourth novel with its anti-sentimental language and depiction of events was marked as one of the most outstanding fictions of the 1930s offering a conspicuous criterion of American fiction since the World War I. The influences of a rich history are apparent in it. The most important events, several themes and some critic's idea, major characters in relation to that era, and Fitzgerald's purpose of creating the major hero of the novel who was ruined by means of his own idealism are analyzed in this article. The dominant setting is the chaotic Western world of post-war which reveals new bindings between the content of Tender and the Western history in relation to World War I, and the story of the protagonist is a microcosm of that history, a chronicle of post- war loss of the kinds of identities associated with stable societies, social altruism and personal responsibility.