1.2 The Influence from John Keats and his “Ode to a Nightingale”

There is no denying that John Keats has a great impact on Fitzgerald’s literal creation. The rhythm and images of Keats’s poems has the greatest influence on his works. Fitzgerald highly recommended Keats and his poems in his essays’ collection The Crack-up. It is known that both the title and the inscription of this novel comes from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”. The inscription is as follows:

Already with thee! tender is the night...

... But here there is no light,

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.(qtd. Fitzgerald, 2011)

This excerpt of the poem creates a gentle, ambiguous and romantic atmosphere. It describes a scene that the night comes while the moon is gradually climbing up. It is a dim and soft night. Following the steps of the poet, there is a secluded quiet trail leading readers to a fragrant and luxuriant world.

The poem “Ode to a Nightingale” has strong romantic features, and it expresses Keats’s deep yearning for the free world through rhetoric like beautiful metaphors and symbols and fluent language. These kind of features also show in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. So, obviously, although the title of this novel was not decided until in the last period of its creation, it is sure that Fitzgerald consciously creates Tender Is the Night in Keats-like romantic style. The writing style is as beautiful as poetry. There are a lot of symbolic descriptions, some of which are exactly brought from the imagines in John Keats’s poem. Thus, “Ode to a Nightingale” helps to present the novel’s themes, and helps readers clarify some symbolic structures which relate to this novel’s understanding.

1.3 Symbolism and Its Use in Tender Is the Night

Symbolism in the literary field started from a French art movement in the late nineteenth century. According to A Glossary of Literary Terms, symbolism means, “a coherent system composed of a number of symbolic elements” (AGLT, 2014: 396). The “symbolic element” is known as “symbol”. As an artistic theory, the symbolism is derived from “symbol”. The term “symbol” comes from the Greek word “symbolon”. It is said that “symbolon” refers to a token that showing friendly affection between two people by putting the previous pided board together when they meet again. Now the meaning of “symbol” has been extended to the sign or item that expresses some ideas or other things.

Symbolism does not depicts the object in a direct way, but it implies the subjective spirit and personal inner world of it through using specific images and symbols. The symbol remains indefinite, but richly, even boundlessly, suggestive in its significance, and also that for this very reason, a symbol is the higher mode of expression. Symbolists, the creators using symbolism, will use their private symbols which make their works to be different from the others’.

Symbolism can be pided into two periods: pre-symbolism and post-symbolism. Post-symbolism refers to a world literary trend after the First World War. The Modern Period in American literature was a notable era of post-symbolism. This era is between the two world wars, marked by the trauma of the great economic depression beginning in 1929. Many of the major writers of the period exploit symbols which are in part drawn from religious and esoteric traditions and in part invented. Some symbols the authors used in their works come from the settings around them, the people be with them, and the actions they have experienced , as well as the objects that attract people at that age.

Tender Is the Night is regarded as a work of American “modern literature”. After the end of World War I, quite a few American writers of the 1920s disillusioned by their war experiences and alienated by what they perceived as “the crassness of American culture and its ‘puritanical’ repressions” (AGLT, 2014: 276). They are called “the Lost Generation” and some of them became expatriates, moving either to London or to Paris in their quest for a richer literary and artistic milieu and a freer way of life. It is an instance of a symbolic procedure that occurs in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, which in part combines the mood and way of life of American expatriating groups. In this work, Fitzgerald used symbols that contained compound meanings, and some of them were quite ironic, which narrated the reality of the American society. The perse and characteristic symbolism in serving the theme of American dream, which helps the style of Tender Is the Night to be extremely distinctive.