The title of the novel is taken from Ode to a Nightingale of the English poet John Keats, where "Tender is the night" rhymes with "But here there is no light." And everything seems to be built around this duality: the calm serenity of hotel lobby lulls infidels, laughter are symptoms of neurosis, orchids are exhausted ... Fitzgerald filed the pre-beckettiennes silhouettes of his characters on a high wire perched above the abyss of Europe of the interwar period, which we already sense that it is courting disaster (see episode of the beating of Rome, foreshadowing the violence of the Mussolini regime ). The balance is precarious, but these troubled souls seem to be enjoying it, that it sway to awkward and yet grandiose rhythm chills their hearts - to the disruption and fall.
"His last card is stamped Hornell, a very small nearby town of Geneva, always in the state of New York. In any case, it certainly has not left the region, and it must be there still in one city or another. " Written under the influence of the preface to Conrad Negro Narcissus, the end of the novel, unconventional, infuses Tender is the night all the tragedy of democratic mediocrity, which cracks the heroes and dust in breakage to anonymous margins . Epitaph of the American dream, Gatsby was primarily a portrait of a decadent era. Nearly a decade later, Fitzgerald, who has "lost the ability to hope on small paths that lead to the sanatorium of Zelda," said another step in "the real dark night of the soul." He signed with Tender is the Night, perhaps his best novel, the chronicle of defeat to be.
