On Dick’s Tragic Fate In Tender Is The Night From The Theory Of Moral Sentiment

Tender Is the Night is composed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who is a distinguished spokesman of the Jazz Age. In this novel, the author explores the emptiness, the disillusion, the oppression and distortion of the post-war bourgeois world and puts forward a series of thought-provoking problems about the reason for Dick’s degeneration by the portrait of Dick’s degeneration process from a charming, righteous psychiatrist step by step to self-indulgence.Firstly, this thesis introduces David Hume and the related ideas of his theory of moral sentiment, such as relationship between reason and passion, and sympathy, one of the natural principles. As regards to reason and passion, this pair of category, Hume asserted that passion is a component of human nature, which controls reason. He also affirms the reason is confined to the world of ideas, serves the passion and directs the will. Next it makes an analysis of Dick’s virtue from his pursuit for success, sense of responsibility and his loyalty to friends, and his good instincts are mainly influenced by his social background and family surroundings. Then it explores Dick’s selfless care and devotion to his wife, Nicole by Hume’s ideas on“passion”and“sympathy”. Meanwhile, his failure in career, breakup of his marriage and breaking-off relations with friends accelerate his spiritual exhaustion, moral collapse, the loss of ideal and dreams. In conclusion, it is his too much devotion and connivance to his wife that makes Dick’s breakdown. The cruel reality makes Dick so exhausted. Unable to achieve his ideal, abide by the moral standards, Dick falls into mental fatigue and moral collapse, ideal loss and disillusion, thereby is abandoned by the society, which reflect his tragic fate.