Zelda is not mentioned because Fitzgerald envisions his breakdown like Eliot’s in “The Waste Land”—impersonal, universal, philosophical. (“These fragments I have shorn against my ruins.”) His collapse is noble, religious, historical, and above all masculine: “It was very distinctly not modern—yet I saw it in others, saw it in a dozen men of honor and industry since the war.” Her crisis by contrast is not seen by him as spiritual, as she is not a great man or one with potential, her crisis is personal, petty.
