moral through the actions and perspectives of the characters around Benjamin, like Roger and Hildegarde.

When Benjamin is first born, his father, Roger Button, is dismayed and appalled by Benjamin’s appearance and relative age. When the nurses tell Mr. Button that he must get his son out of the hospital, he has a “grotesque picture … of himself walking through the crowded streets of the city with this appalling apparition stalking by his side.” In imagining the journey home, he sees them walking past the slave market and “for a dark instant Mr. Button wished passionately that his son was black.” Mr. Button’s rejection of his son based on his appearance is framed as the immoral perspective. With this reaction, Fitzgerald aligns any reader that rejects Benjamin based on his physical appearance with Roger Button, demonstrating his argument unique perspectives are often not valued.

Hildegarde, Benjamin’s wife, also does not appreciate Benjamin’s unique life. He tries to tell her that the aging in reverse is real and she does not believe him. She tells Benjamin,

You think you don’t want to be like any one else. You always have been that way, and you always will be. But just think how it would be if every one else looked at things as you do—what would the world do?

Hildegarde, like Roger, is closed to the idea that Benjamin’s unique perspective is something to be valued and celebrated.

While “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is not framed as a morality tale, Fitzgerald argues that the society around Benjamin suffers because they do not value Benjamin’s unique perspective. Instead of accepting his reverse aging for the opportunities it could provide, society rejects him time and time again. Fitzgerald frames this perspective as lacking virtue, so it can be interpreted as the moral of the story.

Fitzgerald's story is a meditation on the inexplicable nature of "life." I would argue that he's not so much presenting a moral as implying that life in its forward process (or progress) makes little sense. If it occurs in retrograde, backwards, it makes no less sense than in the normal forward way.

Button begins life as an old man then "youthens," (the term applied to Merlin in some versions of the Arthurian legends), finally becoming a baby and seemingly fading into oblivion: non-existence. The irony is that it's a mirror of normal life, because ordinary people begin helpless, become functional beings, and then end as helpless beings again in old age. It reminds one of the Sphynx's riddle solved by Oedipus: what goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening? The answer is Man, and the riddle symbolizes the kind of cyclic journey of life, beginning with weakness, moving to a condition of strength, and returning to weakness again.

On one level, Fitzgerald is simply giving us an amusing conceit. The deeper meaning, however, is that this retrograde life span, simply because it is so bizarre, forces us to examine "real" life and to recognize how similar the forward process is to the backward one. In both cases, man sadly fades into nothingness at the end.