Disillusionment and Disconnection

 For the past weeks' readings, what I had found most interesting was Tender is the Night and Sputnik Sweetheart. Both stories had focused on the emotional / mental downfall of the female characters. In Sputnik Sweetheart, Miu recounts how she was split in two, becoming two separate entities. One where she is tormented by a Spanish man and she is constantly trying to get away from him, and the other where she seems to be attracted to the man. She eventually is forced to face this other half of herself when she's trapped on a Ferris wheel and she sees her other self sleeping with the man. She is so repulsed by it that she faints and loses all color in her hair. This makes her disgusted with the idea of sex, and yet, despite this, the narrator is still in love with her. 

There is then a similar notion of mental decay seen in Tender is the Night, where Nicole acts out throughout the chapter while Dick is desperate to try to control her. There are these instances where Nicole seems calm enough, yet they are almost immediately juxtaposed, like when she fights with Dick over a letter she received from one of his patients, or when they also get to the fair, she abandons her kids and dick to go to the Ferris wheel, and the chapter ends with her crashing the car while Dick is driving. 

In both these chapters, love is inherently corrosive for both men, as they are willing to put up with the shortcomings of the unstable women they are dating. It inherently depicts love as capable of transcending, but consistently falls short and ends in estrangement. Both women seem to long for intimacy but both couples only experience distance and the women themselves experience disintegration of the self. The disintegration of self then creates these fragmented personalities that allow for both Murakami and Fitzgerald to explore trauma and desire, and how it can divide the self and make one emotionally unstable.

Pilar Diaz