Tender Is the Night and the Calculus of Modern War

Abstract

Despite conventional wisdom on the topic of Fitzgerald and war – that because he was not a combatant, war therefore had little effect on him and his work – it is important to understand the ways in which he thought World War I had fundamentally and irretrievably changed Western civilization. Fitzgerald did not write combat literature that emphasizes the naturalistic aspects of modern war, as his old friend Hemingway did most notably in A Farewell to Arms (1929), but he did write one of the most engaging war novels, Tender Is the Night , about the aftermath of World War I. In this essay, I shall explore the ways in which Tender functions as a war novel, as opposed to combat fiction, differences that can best be understood when the novel is contrasted with other World War I fiction, such as Henry Barbusse's Under Fire: The Story of a Squad . Moreover, the broader social implications of war in Tender , such as Dick Diver's war neuroses, are easier to contextualize in relation to such works as Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma and William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair , novels about war during the Napoleonic period. I shall argue that, while in these nineteenth-century novels war is not shown as having had a lasting psychological effect on society, in Tender Fitzgerald clearly shows the lasting psychological impact of World War I.