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Mental Breakdown In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack Up

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In both an essay, and a letter to his daughter, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, he talks of the mental breakdown that he had. The Crack Up is the essay where he exclusively explains what happend and why he had his mental breakdown. The letter to his daughter, Scottie, which has been titled as Dearest Scottie, he talks to her about how he does not want her to end up like him and his wife. In both, he speaks of how him having a mental breakdown affected his career, and how that played a role in halting him in achieving his goals. In The Crack Up, Fitzgerald explains what caused him to have a mental breakdown, and how he was dealing with it. Before it happend, as he says in his essay, “Up to forty-nine it’ll be alright. I can count on that.” He believed that a man who lived as he had could enjoy a normal worry free life until then. He then realized that he was wrong to assume that because, as he says in the essay “I had prematurely cracked.” When he says this, he means that his breakdown has arrived earlier than he had anticipated- 10 years too early, infact. The cause of his premature “crack” was from the stress of films over taking novels in popularity, and from his collapsing marriage.Also from the fear of his daughter ending up like himself and …show more content…

He speaks about his marriage with her mother first, saying she is the reason he was not able to accomplish anything with his career, saying that “she wanted me to work too much for her and not for my dream.” He also criticizes his daughter, say that she had “spent two years doing no useful work at all.” When he judges his daughter like this, he does it from the perspective of what he was trying to accomplish when he was her age, because he had a goal he wished to reach. Fitzgerald must have thought that she had no goal in mind, and was wasting her time bettering herself, like he currently

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She also implies that women have a hard role to play in life and it is better to take the easy way out. Daisy wants her daughter to be ignorant because if her daughter is unintelligent she won’t know how the real world works and that there are other men to marry than just men like Tom. 5 “She never loved you, do you hear?” he cried “She only married you because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake, but in her heart, she never loved anyone except me!”- (Fitzgerald 151).

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Fitzgerald utilizes parallel structure and a rhetorical question to highlight the nature of Daisy’s personality. Daisy has a desire to become aware of minor events which she somehow seems important, however, she becomes easily distracted in finding pleasure. This also demonstrates Daisy’s sense of haste and egotism, as she didn’t care to wait for anyone else’s answer, and is concerned with her only her own.

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The masterpiece was Fitzgerald’s way of not only escaping the darkness that he felt surrounded by but also being helpful for those reading his essays. The crack-up contains Fitzgerald’s personal breakdowns that were the key to connection with the audience. He struggled to keep balance which lead him to making a masterpiece for his faithful readers and not only. The Crack- up was Fitzgerald’s way of sharing his philosophical ideas about life.

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