Blog Entry #2

From Tender Is the Night page 12

She awoke drenched with sweat to find the beach deserted save for the man in the jokey cap, who was folding a last umbrella. As Rosemary lay blinking, he walked nearer and said:
"I was going to wake you before I left. It's not good to get too burned right away."
"Thank you." Rosemary looked down at her crimson legs.
"Heavens!"
She laughed cheerfully, inviting him to talk, but Dick Diver was already carrying a tent and a beach umbrella up to a waiting car, so she went into the water to wash off the sweat. He came back and gathering up a rake, a shovel, and a sieve, stowed them in a crevice of a rock. He glanced up and down the beach to see if he had left anything.
"Do you know what time it is?" Rosemary asked.
"It's about half-past one."
They faced the seascape together momentarily.
"It's not a bad time," said Dick Diver. "It's not one of worst times of the day."
He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently. Then he shouldered his last piece of junk and went up to his car, and Rosemary came out of the water, shook out her peignoir and walked up to the hotel.

Fitzgerald doesn't use a lot of dialogue. He usually focuses on the scenery and in the actual telling of the story. But whenever he does use dialogue it's simple and casual. It seems that in his writing he really uses dialogue as a way of simple, day-to-day expression but the important descriptive things he writes as narration.

Pgs. 3-12
Rosemary and her mother are vacationing in France. Rosemary is a new movie star. She is 18. She speaks French. Rosemary is a good swimmer. Some of the people on the beach call to her and she goes reluctantly. They like to be with her but she would prefer to be with the other beach goers, only she'd feel like a stranger because they have a pattern or ritual that she might break. Rosemary falls in love with Dick Diver.

For my paper I might want to analyze the effect dialogue has on Fitzgerald's books. Tender Is the Night is very much storytelling, and is that why he has less dialogue?