Plot
Save Me the Waltz, according to its author, derives its title from a Victor record catalog, and it suggests the romantic glitter of the life which F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald lived and which Scott’s novels have so indelibly written into American literary and cultural history. Divided into four chapters, each of which is further divided into three parts, the novel is a chronological narrative of four periods in the lives of Alabama and David Knight, names that are but thin disguises for their real-life counterparts.
Save Me The Waltz is the story of Alabama Beggs, a Southern girl who marries a twenty-two-year-old artist, David Knight. As with Zelda and Scott, Alabama met David when he was in the South during World War I. Knight becomes a successful painter, and the family moves to the Riviera where Knight begins an affair with an actress. Determined to be successful in her own right, Alabama decides to become a ballet dancer and devotes herself relentlessly to the cause, eventually achieving success. Alabama dances her solo debut in the opera Faust. Though outwardly successful, Alabama and David are miserable. At the novel's end they return to the South when Alabama's father dies. Though she says otherwise, her friends from the South go on about how happy and lucky Alabama is. Alabama searches for meaning in her father's death, but finds none. While cleaning up after their final party before returning to their unhappy lives, Alabama remarks — an interesting contrast to the closing lines of The Great Gatsby — that emptying the ashtrays is "very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled 'the past,' and having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue."
Read more about this topic: Save Me The Waltz
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)