Tender Is the Night displays a strong sense of remorse and a disillusionment of dream. The story explores a process of mental breakdown that resembles Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda’s personal experience. And it also embodies Fitzgerald’s attitudes towards life and his all efforts of pursuing dreams through Dick’s pursuit of his career, in which Fitzgerald shows his enterprise of realizing the dreams though the ending of the story is bleak. 

1.3 The Versions of Tender Is the Night

Though the fiction Tender Is the Night is well known today, it has been revised the version several times. Today’s version differs from the original one in the order of each part. The original version presents the marriage of Dick and Nicole as a flashback. But the revised version adopts a more straightforward way to narrate the story. It describes their marriage at first. There are so many critics who argued about the two versions. Some of them though the final version was confused and it lost the dramatic suspense of the story. That is the reason why so many reviewers criticized the novel. But the fact is that Tender Is the Night is successful today, so it can be seen that the final version is reasonable. Even the ablest defenders of the original text agreed that the “suspenseful” qualities of either version must be judged by what they contribute to Fitzgerald’s larger purposes. So the author Fitzgerald created an imperishable work in the field of literature.