Chapter Book Two of Tender is the Night - Study Guide by F. Scott Fitzgerald

We see a gradual interest in other women; the girl at the ski lodge, the pretty woman at Innsbruck (221) - he falls in love all over the place and begins to realise his deterioration,

"He had lost himself - he could not tell the hour when, or the day or the week... . Between the time he found Nicole... and the moment of his meeting Rosemary the spear had been blunted" (220)

The news of his father's death leaves him floundering as we learn all his judgements and decisions were referred to what his father might of done. The Reverend appears as a master of taste rather than theology as he is praised for his kind manners rather than his religious beliefs, "very much the gentleman" (223). It Dick's last remaining solid tie and blood relation. With the death of his father comes the end of a phase in Dick's life; his history, moral code and behaviour that he builds his identity on is buried in the ground: "Good- by, my father - good-by, all my fathers" (TN 224).

On the steamboat he meets the more successful and consequently pleasanter McKiscos and adopts a lost family hoping to help and be admired - his degradation becomes more apparent as his alcohol intake increases. In Naples he bumps into the person who he has been searching for: Rosemary. He worries about how attractive he will appear to the older and less naïve Rosemary, realises his "lesion of enthusiasm" and stops more often for gin and tonics. At their second meeting and inquiring into each other's lives they fall into kissing. Haunted by the reappearance of Collis Clay and his story about the curtain, Dick asks Rosemary about her lovers and "shots at love" (231) but cannot figure out her teasing answers, he cannot understand what is behind the act, but what had "begun with a childish infatuation on a beach was accomplished at last" (233). He tortures himself with thoughts of her with other men, leaving her he drinks with Collis Clay and dances with a stranger. He starts a drunken brawl with a taxi driver, acts violently in the police station and ends up in a cell. It is up to Baby Warren to bail him out after pulling various strings and flashing her wealth and powerful position. On his exit from jail, Dick is mistaken for the man who raped and killed a five-year-old girl. In his dissolute, guilt ridden state, he admits to the crime he has not committed, inferring a sexual violation that he believes he has against Nicole: "I want to explain to theses people how I raped a five-year-old girl. Maybe I did" (256).