An Analysis Of Alienated Selves In Tender Is The Night:from Fromm’s Humanistic Psychoanalytic View

Tender Is The Night is Fitzgerald’s fourth novel written within almost ten years (1925-1934). In this novel the author tries to use new devices and new ways of thinking to express his great expectation and discernment towards life and society, infusing his deep insight into the exquisite lines. Profound and rich in meaning, Tender Is The Night is another great novel after The Great Gatsby.In the1920s in American society, on the express of technology and economy, people were obsessed in pursuing wealth. Traditional values lost their due importance when rampant materialism took the place of religion and became an idol in people’s life. Nietzsche’s declaration of death of God and Darwin’s theory of "survival of the fittest" crushed people’s beliefs. The development of technology and economy accelerated automatization of social machine and people were dehumanized and alienated gravely. Mamonism, hedonism, materialism and consumerism popularized among people and filled the moral vacuum before new values system was established. People’s craving for money, power and success increased almost to idolatry. More and more people automatically conform to the anonymous authority. They lost their true selves and suffered from alienation symptoms such as anxiety, aloneness, separateness and powerlessness.Like Fitzgerald himself, the protagonist in Tender Is The Night has interest in psychoanalysis and socialistic reforms on society in order to interpret and reconstruct the world. Humanistic psychoanalyst Fromm incorporates Marxism and Freudian theory and forms his unique humanistic psychoanalytic theory on alienation, which reveals internal and external causes of alienation. The thesis intends to use Fromm’s points to interpret the author’s intention and tries to find out how the main characters in Tender Is The Night are alienated into "robots" in the materialized capitalist society and lose themselves under the control of anonymous authority. The thesis goes further to analyze the cause of their alienation and how the protagonist reconstructs his sense of identity and sense of worth.