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Book 1, Chapter 20
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Tender Is the Night, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Excess, Destruction, and the Failed American Dream
Gender, Mental Illness, and Psychiatry
The Pursuit of Youth and Innocence
Racism and Otherness
Summary
Analysis
After Dick has been waiting outside the studio for 45 minutes, a man approaches him to ask for a light. Dick is not in the mood to chat with anybody, but the man is friendly and starts to chat with Dick, who suspects the man might be plotting to rob him.
Dick is impatient to see Rosemary and the long wait only serves to increase his desire. He is irritated when a stranger interrupts his thoughts about her.
Themes
Deciding that Rosemary must have left already, Dick rings her hotel room from a café. “I’m in an extraordinary condition about you,” Dick admits, “When a child can disturb a middle-aged gent—things get difficult.” Rosemary encourages Dick, saying, “you’re the youngest person in the world.” Hearing the words “Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?” ring in his head again, Dick tells Rosemary he’d like to be in her hotel room.
Disturbingly, despite his sexual desire for her, Dick continues to refer to Rosemary as a child. Dick stops himself saying “gentleman,” perhaps because he realizes that this sordid affair inevitably means he will no longer be a gentleman. Rosemary encourages Dick, downplaying the age difference between them by calling him “the youngest person in the world.”
Themes
After she has hung up the phone, Rosemary finishes a letter to her mother. She tells her of a man she’s recently met and fallen in love with, adding “Of course I Do Love Dick Best but you know what I mean.” Meanwhile, Dick and Nicole dress up nicely and head out to watch a play together—a tradition of theirs. Dick is keen to go out because, he says, it’s “better than brooding—” before realizing that “This was a blunder.” He dismisses the comment, pretending that it referred to Maria Wallis.
It is not clear whether Rosemary has really met another man, or whether she simply wants to mislead her mother about Dick, now that their affair is so close to becoming sexual. Either way, it does appear that Rosemary has a great deal more control over the situation than Dick does, and that she has seemingly grown out of her childish infatuation for Dick. Dick takes Nicole out to the theatre because he is desperate to be distracted from thinking and worrying about Rosemary. Usually he has an incredible ability to say exactly the right thing, but his careless “blunder” here reveals that Dick is spiraling out of control.
Themes
