Babylon Revisited F. Scott Fitzgerald - Cecil D. Eby (essay date 1995)
Cecil D. Eby (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: "Fitzgerald's 'Babylon Revisited'," in The Explicator, Vol. 53, No. 3, Spring, 1995, pp. 176-77.
[In the following essay, Eby focuses on Fitzgerald's use of double entendre to convey the themes of the story.]
"Babylon Revisited" is by any reckoning the most frequently anthologized and widely read of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short stories. It opens and closes (appropriately) in the Ritz bar in Paris, where Paul, the manager, and Charles Wales reflect on the changes wrought by the stock market crash of 1929 and the economic depression that followed. But the two men are locked in two wholly discrete dimensions. Paul conceives the crash and the depression purely in economic terms, while Charles is haunted by the dissipated lifestyle of the boom years that ended with his wife's death, his daughter Honoria's adoption by his sister-in-law, and his own stint in a sanitarium for alcoholics. Their brief...
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