Trying to get his girl back, Charles clumsily promises her material benefits once more, indicating thus that he is not accustomed to offer anything else but money. As Fitzgerald hints, the luxurious Twenties with their economical boom brought material comfort but at the same time a lot of unhappiness caused by a reversal of values in society. Making and spending money had thus become the true coordinates of life, replacing the traditional values, like spirituality or family. I think that the themes that Fitzgerald expounds on are still valid in our present-day life. For instance, consumerism has affected my life as well as that of the people around me, and I feel that the material pursuits sometimes stand in the way of healthy human relationships.
Modernism in Babylon Revisited
Fitzgerald's works always bear the imprint of modernism. The protagonist of Babylon Revisited, Charles, is a successful business man and a failed family man. His story indicates that he has lost his family because he has striven so much for economical progress that he has forgotten about the more important things in his life. His neglect in what regards his wife and his child is inexcusable from a moral point-of-view. However, Fitzgerald intends...
Although the magic decade has brought material prosperity, the extreme material debauchery has obviously affected the spiritual life of the people. Thus, Charles is only guilty in as much as he has no sense of discernment and he confuses material comfort with happiness. For the rest, he is only a victim of the Roaring Twenties, who took on the general mood of his time. It is only at the end that he realizes what he longs for is someone to love and not more loads of money. The conflict in the story can be thus represented as a battle between the age and the individual. The end of the story is unclear, and we do not know for sure whether Charles will eventually get his child back. What is certain however, is that he understands now that he although he has lost his money with the rest in the stock exchange crash, his real loss occurred during the boom when he lost his wife and his little girl.
Works Cited
Hemingway, Ernest. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories. New York: Scribner Classics, 1999.
Fitzgerald, Francis Scott. "Babylon Revisited" in Collected Short Stories. New York: The Modern Library, 1975
