"Apathy" In Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night

As a brilliant spokesman of the "Jazz Age" and a representative writer of "the Lost Generation", F. Scott Fitzgerald is regarded to be the most important novelist who seizes the characteristics of his age. Tender Is the Night, the novel which takes Fitzgerald nine years to complete in his late years, is maturer and more significant compared with The Great Gatsby. While reading the novel, the reader can feel apathy here and there, weaving among characters and between the lines. How does the apathy generally expressed in the novel? What are the roots of apathy? Based on the theory of modern psychoanalysis, this thesis aims to examine the manifestation of the apathy in Tender Is the Night and to explore the social and psychological roots which result in the characters' psychological apathy. As the thesis points out, apathy manifests itself in the novel mainly through the description of the scenes, the characters' behavioral apathy, cognitive apathy and affective apathy, as well as the apathetic relationships among the characters. And the thesis further reveals that from the socioenvironmental perspective, the loss of faith and the decay of morality are concluded to be the roots of behavioral apathy and cognitive apathy, while from the perspective of psychological theories presented by Freud, namely theory of three structures of personality, of the Oedipus complex and of transference, the roots of the character's affective apathy result from the psychological symptoms of the character himself, such as Dick's personality disorder, the loss of the ego, the id's victory over the superego, as well as his transference love affairs.