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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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