Zurich is the point of departure for the second edition of Tender Is the Night, where the city marks the beginning of Dick Diver and Nicole Warren’s shared history. Its significance is also structural: moving the opening to Zurich replaces the first edition’s delayed revelation of the marriage’s past with a chronological account that starts in 1919.

Setting and Narrative Placement

In the second edition, the novel begins in 1919 in Zurich. Dick is a young doctor when a psychiatrist friend calls him there to take over Nicole’s difficult case. The city thus frames their first connection through the circumstances of her treatment, before the couple’s later life at their villa on the French Riviera.

Zurich and Nicole’s Case

Zurich introduces Nicole not as part of the polished social world encountered later in the novel, but as a patient whose case Dick is asked to assume. The opening situates the relationship within the medical encounter that precedes their marriage, while the description of the case as difficult signals the troubled history that will shadow their life together.

The City’s Editorial Significance

The Zurich opening resulted from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s rearrangement of the novel’s material for its second edition, after the first printing failed. The original version begins years later on the French Riviera, with Rosemary viewing the Divers’ glamorous marriage from the outside; it gradually hints at the trauma beneath that surface, then turns back to Dick and Nicole’s earlier history before returning to their deteriorating marriage. Beginning instead in Zurich puts those events into chronological order. In the book’s analysis, however, chronological order does not settle the meaning of their history: the earlier account cannot simply explain Dick’s fate as the unfolding of an individual character, and the first edition’s return to the past may itself operate as a retrospective fantasy. Zurich therefore marks a narrative beginning, not a complete causal key to what follows.