What provoked me to write this blog post was a common opinion I encountered on the internet that Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald's best work, his true masterpiece, while Tender is the Night on the other hand fails to live up to the expectations established by the former.
Reading Tender is the Night and wanting to find out what the other people thought of it, I was surprised to find out that many people on Goodreads considered Great Gatsby to be a better novel than Tender is the Night and even went so far as to proclaim that the latter was a failure.* (Well, even if it were a failure, which I do not agree with, it is a failure greater than many successes). Since at that point I only read about one-third of a novel (Book one) and actually liked it, I expected the quality of the book to progressively spiral down. But as I kept reading, I discovered not only that the quality of the book (and of the writing itself) remained consistent but even got better in the latter parts. Now after I have read the novel in its entirety I can confidently say that I think that Tender is the Night is superior to Great Gatsby. Why do I think that?
First of all, it is much more ambitious work. This means that strictly speaking it shouldn't even be regarded on the same plane as Great Gatsby. More importantly, Tender is the Night is better written. By comparing descriptions in the two novels, it becomes obvious to what extent Fitzgerald's writing style has developed - his descriptions (both of the reality and of the characters' psyche) became much more detailed and vivid. Simply put, there are descriptions of such sublime beauty in Tender is the Night that one just cannot find in Great Gatsby. Finally, while Great Gatsby, for all its modernist elements, still remains a realist novel, Tender is the Night is definitely a modernist one. This is to say the transition Fitzgerald began with Great Gatsby was completed with Tender is the Night. Now, this is not to say that there are no realist elements in Tender is the Night. Just as in Great Gatsby there are already elements of modernism, so in Tender is the Night there are still elements of realism, although the dominance has clearly changed in favour of modernism. A clear manifestation of this can be seen in narration. While Tender is the Night retains an omniscient narrator in the third person, the majority of narration is actually focalized through the perspective of one of the characters. And this goes not only for the three main characters - Dick, Nicole, and Rosemary - but like some other great modernist writers, Fitzgerald at certain critical points in the novel shifts to the perspective of one of the minor characters like Abe North, Baby Warren and even wife of Dick's colleague, Franz Gregorovious. Not to forget, there are even places in the text when narration slips into an (unquoted) inner monologue - either by Dick or Nicole. As a result, Tender is the Night often felt like a weird mix of Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf. Surely, this can be regarded as a failure, but to me, it bespeaks the richness of the novel which combines detachment and irony with immersion into subjective (and often unreliable) views of the world.
In the end, I would say that it is completely understandable that Great Gatsby is a more popular (and more widely read) novel than Tender is the Night for it is shorter as well as more accessible. Also, Tender is the Night is not so compactly constructed as Great Gatsby; it definitely has more flaws. But in terms of narrative complexity as well as the beauty of the written language, it definitely excels Great Gatsby.
* It is not only unprofessional readers who privilege Great Gatsby to Tender is the Night but also cultural institutions such as the publishing house Modern Library which ranked Great Gatsby as the second best English-language novel of the 20th century, behind Ulysses, while Tender is the Night was placed as 28th.
