F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Last Tycoon, “There are no second acts in American lives.”
This is often quoted, usually in a way that equates “no second acts” with “no second chances.” I suspect the real meaning is somewhat different, but what?
A closely related question, what’s the purpose of the second act in the structure of a play?
I don’t have a copy of the book handy, but I read in The Dictionary of Misinformation by Tom Burnam that Fitzgerald really meant that American lives go too quickly, from beginning to end, with no build-up. In a three-act play, the second act contains all the build-up and climax, while the first and last acts contain only the beginning and end, which is what Fitzgerald apparently thought American lives consisted primarily of.
This is all from memory, so hopefully someone who knows more than I will back me up (or tell me I’m full of crap ;)).
He meant that American lives, or rather the American view of life, is all about the instant of success/failure and not about the full buildup and denouement, &c.
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Personally I think Fitzgerald was a brilliant writer, but on this one he’s painting with too broad a brush. It’s true to some degree that we look for the one defining moment in a life, and then seem almost to resent people who insist on trying to continue on after some other shiny thing has grabbed our attention (Kato Kaelin, Scott “Wide Right” Norwood, John Rocker), but I think that’s mainly a function of mass media/pop culture, which is emphatically not a reflection of all Americans.
[/editorial comment]
Rough-and-ready explanation of three-act structure:
ACT 1: Introduce your protagonist
ACT 2: Get your protagonist stuck up a tree
ACT 3: Get your protagonist out of the tree
Depending on the type of play it may not be as simple as toadspittle describes.
For example: In the 19th Century naturalistic theatre often (usually) used the format of the well made play or ‘piéce bien faite’ as described by Eugéne Scribe in 1836.
This structure has five acts and act two tends to be less about getting stuck up trees and more about revealing previous events and learning more about characters. I don’t seem to be able to google a more detailed explanation of the five acts and I don’t have my textbooks to hand.