The Disintegration of Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night

The exact nature of Dick Diver¹s descent throughout the course of Tender is the Night is difficult to discern. It is clear enough that his disintegration is occasioned by Nicole¹s 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 Nicole¹s strength to her naturalness, her identification with instinct and natural impulse, and Dick¹s 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 novel¹s 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 animalistic wildness of instinct. This is most obvious in the uninhibited expression of emotion which 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, unconcernedŠ.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, "Nicole¹s 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