Dick Diver’s Moral Decline In Tender Is The Night

F.Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night is one of the literary works of the 1920 s that depict the moral decline of America.It artistically presents the complex and special psychological changes of the author.Therefore,it is necessary to study the text from the perspective of psychology.Most scholars use psychoanalysis to interpret the hero in the novel by introducing the concept of unconscious motive.This dissertation focuses on attribution problem and personality development,and with the aid of Shame Model in the theory of social psychology,explains the hero’s moral decline.In addition,projective method is used to study the author and his works,which not only reflects his attitudes but also enhances understanding of the complexity of human psychology and behavior.Shame Model presents inter-relations between measures of appraisal,feeling and motivation,reflecting the latent structure of people’s experience of moral failure.Shame can be subdivided into rejection,inferiority,and guilt according to different appraisals.While the first two typically stimulate self-defensive motivation,the latter is associated with self-improvement motivation.When moral failure is perceived as other-condemnation,avoiding further damage to the social image becomes the primary goal;when it is perceived as a self-defect,improving the self-image is the focus.Shame Model explains why the experience of moral failures lead to different motivations.The novel follows the emotional entanglement of Rosemary,Dick and Nicole where the hero Dick Diver goes through three moral crises.He marries the rich psychotic Nicole at the expense of his ideal.He has an affair with Hollywood girl Rosemary regardless of his ethics.He indulges himself for years with his profession unfulfilled.Diver goes from original rejection to being guilty and then to being inferior.He can’t get rid of the awkward social image that he is “bought” by the Warren family,and that he is hardly “made” into an ideal aristocrat.Global attribution increases his self-defensive motivation,thus he resorts to evasion.Later,his self-image is ruined by infidelity and alcoholism,but external attribution decreases his motivation for selfimprovement.Therefore,it’s responsibility avoidance caused by dysfunctional personality rather than environmental corrosion that should be responsible for Diver’s moral debacle.Moreover,Fitzgerald’s ambivalence is embodied in his character.He yearns for the upper class but satirizes the rich.He sees through the emptiness behind the vanity while enjoying the current extravagant life.Diver’s final retreat to a small town is the awakening after disillusionment of the American dream.The ethical dimension of exploring a new moral system and solution endows the novel with brilliance of rational thinking in today’s cultural context.