Babylon Revisited F. Scott Fitzgerald | Robert I. Edenbaum (essay date 1968)
Robert I. Edenbaum (essay date 1968)
SOURCE: "'Babylon Revisited': A Psychological Note on F. Scott Fitzgerald," in Literature and Psychology, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1968, pp. 27-9.
[In the following essay, Edenbaum contends that, through an inconsistency in the plot, Fitzgerald reveals that he identifies with Charlie Wales.]
F. Scott Fitzgerald's story "Babylon Revisited" concerns the return of Charlie Wales one-and-a-half years later to the Babylon that was—the Paris of 1929—in an attempt to retrieve what he can from the two lost years of drunken revelry that had culminated in the death of his wife, his own incarceration in a sanitarium, and the legal signing over of his daughter, Honoria, to his sister-in-law, Marion Peters. All he can hope to retrieve—other than ambivalent memories: "We were a sort of royalty"; "it was a nightmare"—is Honoria. And that possibility is destroyed, at least temporarily, when his old friends, Duncan...
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