“Tender is the Night” (post 2) by F. Scott Fitzgerald (post 3): Dick Diver’s multiple personality memory gaps and Nicole Diver’s “different simple people”

In the second half of the novel, Dick, a psychiatrist—married to Nicole (a former mental patient, who probably has multiple personality, but is now usually stable)—becomes an alcoholic. He even has, it would, at first, appear, alcohol blackouts:

“He went three hundred yards up the slope to the other hotel, he engaged a room and found himself washing without a memory of the intervening ten minutes, only a sort of drunken flush pierced with voices, unimportant voices that did not know how much he was loved” (1, p. 177).

“Dick finished his bottle and then danced with the English girl again, conquering his unwilling body with bold revolutions and stern determined marches down the floor. The most remarkable thing suddenly happened. He was dancing with the girl, the music stopped—and she had disappeared” (1, p. 265).

Two peculiarities of these episodes are 1. how brief a time the amnesia covers (ten minutes and the length of a dance), and 2. in the first episode, there are auditory hallucinations (voices). If the amnesia were the result of alcohol toxicity from a high blood-alcohol level, why would it have been so brief? But the more interesting question is why Dick heard voices. Voices may be heard in severe alcohol withdrawal, but they are not usually heard during intoxication. And this is not the only time that Dick has heard voices. It is an “old” experience:

“But the old interior laughter had begun inside him…the laughter inside him became so loud that it seemed as if [the person he was speaking to] must hear it…” (1, p. 368).

As I said, people don’t usually hear voices when they are drunk. And the voices Dick hears are personalized, like they are voices of people or personalities: “voices that did not know how much he was loved.” Moreover, his hearing these voices is apparently an old, recurring experience: “the old interior laughter.”

Although alcohol intoxication does not typically feature auditory hallucinations, multiple personality does: the voices of alternate personalities speaking from behind the scenes. Therefore, Dick has probably had multiple personality memory gaps, not alcohol blackouts.

(Search “memory gaps” for past posts on this cardinal symptom of multiple personality.)

Other passages suggestive of his having multiple personality include:

“Dick moved on through the rain, demoniac and frightened, the passions of many men inside him…” (1, p. 122).

“His love for Nicole and Rosemary, his friendship with Abe North, with Tommy Barban in the broken universe of the war’s ending—in such contacts the personalities had seemed to press up so close to him that he became the personality itself—there seemed some necessity of taking all or nothing; it was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people…” (1, p. 287).

The latter passage might be a description of how a novelist takes in the personalities of people he knows, which may start out as being like the real-life person, but will get creatively processed to become characters, what I have called “character alternate personalities (CAPs).”

Nicole’s multiplicity

Similarly, Nicole says, “When I talk I say to myself that I am probably Dick. Already I have even been my son, remembering how wise and slow he is. Sometimes I am Doctor Dohmler and one time I may even be an aspect of you, Tommy Barban” (1, p. 191).

“…a split personality—Nicole was alternately a person to whom nothing need be explained and one to whom nothing could be explained” (1, p. 227).

“ ‘Think how you love me,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight’ ” (1, p. 238).

“You know, you’re a little complicated after all.”

“Oh no,” [Nicole] assured him hastily. “No, I’m not really—I’m just a—I’m just a whole lot of different simple people” (1, p. 343).

“Multiple personality” was renamed “dissociative identity” in the psychiatric diagnostic manual (the DSM) to emphasize that although the person may appear multiplied, they are really subdivided: into different, relatively simple, people-like parts.

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tender is the Night [1934]. New Delhi, Rupa, 2013.