An Analysis Of Spatial Forms In Tender Is The Night By Fitzgerald

Tender Is the Night is regarded as Fitzgerald’s most controversial novel. Fitzgerald had placed great hope on it. He once dreamed that it could bring him great success just as The Great Gatsby did, however the truth was that it received more bad reviews than good reviews. Though, many scholars discussed the novel from the angle of theme, structure, character and gender, few of them mentioned the spatial forms in it.Joseph Frank first put forward the concept of space form in his essay Space Forms in Modern Literature in 1945. In his opinion, space forms in the novel are achieved by writer’s breaking the traditional linear sequence of the events and breaking the time flow. So that the reader must weave those seemingly illogical but thematically related factors into a space in his imagination by the reading method of “reflexive reference”. The author of this thesis tries to analyze the novel from the perspective of spatial form, focusing on the three types of space forms, namely, physical space, textual space and perceptive space and aiming to find out what is new in the novel that Fitzgerald was talking about when writing to one of his friends.This thesis consists of five parts: Chapter one is a brief introduction about the motivation, outline, and significance of this thesis. Chapter two presents international and domestic literature review. Chapter three introduces Joseph Frank and theory of space form in detail. Chapter four gives a detailed discussion about the three kinds of space form in the novel: physical space, textual space and perceptional space. Chapter five comes to the conclusion part.In the novel, the construction of physical space is mainly through the frequent change of places and scenes, which shows the reader the process of the hero Dick’s deterioration. And the textual space is achieved mainly by the spatialized narrative perspective and juxtaposition of the plots, which break the time flow and linearity in the novel. While many images, symbols and scenes appear frequently in the novel, which form references in the novel. These references form a perceptional space in the reader’s mind which can contribute to a better understanding of the theme.By analyzing the three spatial forms in Tender Is the Night from the perspective of Joseph Frank’s spatial form theory, this paper aims to prove that Fitzgerald had adopted spatial writing skill to present this novel and that his talking about the novel that its form and structure were quite new was true. Besides, the author hopes to broaden the meaning of the novel and that more scholars can use spatial form theory to analyze novels.