ABSTRACT
Fitzgerald's own anxieties over the conflicting identities between his career as a professional writer and his aspiration as a literary artist intensified in the mature vision of his fiction. Given very different financial and personal constraints, Keats and Fitzgerald were both uncertain of their vocation as writers. The inherent conflicts of the artistic self are, for Fitzgerald, played out in Tender is the Night a title indebted to Keats's own visionary struggle of Ode to a Nightingale and the novel's portrayal of Dick Diver, who as a psychiatrist embodies objective scientific, rational, detachment and subjective, empathetic, imaginative engagement. Ultimately, the self-division and duality of Dick's sympathies are paralyzing his faculties. This is ironic, given that at the outset of Tender is the Night, Dick possesses an extraordinary virtuosity with people and is capable of admitting, and absorbing, individuals into his own psychological and emotional world through his power of arousing a fascinated and uncritical love in those around him.
