30 pages • 1 hour read
F. Scott FitzgeraldThe Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1922A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Time and Aging
The reverse-aging premise of “Benjamin Button” allows Fitzgerald to explore time and its relation to human aging. There are multiple strands of time in the text: historical time, personal time, remembered time, and what one might call metaphysical time.
The personal strand is the one Fitzgerald pulls, teasing it out by running one character’s aging experience in reverse while those around him age normally. Historical, personal, and metaphysical time are usually all in accordance. “Personal time” is the aging process, the natural evolution of an individual who is born and grows, reaches a prime, slowly declines, and finally dies. “Metaphysical time” is the foundation, the eternal flux, the flowing passage, that the individual experiences as aging. Metaphysical time moves in one direction only. Benjamin Button is moving forward in time but backward in age. Readers can confirm that he’s moving forward in time by looking at the progression of “historical time” marked in wars and technological changes that affect Benjamin and everyone else around him. Readers can contrast this depiction with Martin Amis’ novel Time’s Arrow in which time moves backward and where death is the birth of each character equally. Time itself is not reversed in “Benjamin Button”; only aging is.
But, in a sense, all people can experience a type of time reversal in “remembered time.” While age and time flow in one direction, people can reach backward into the past through memory. These immaterial but deeply felt experiences are almost the stuff of fantasy, and yet they form the foundations of human identities. Benjamin’s final phase of life is indicated by a gradual blurring of memory until his past experiences fade “like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been” (195). Remembered time is our source of self and our measuring stick for historical time, but it is destined to decay, taking the past with it.
Fitzgerald was deeply interested in the human resistance to the passage of time. This theme is famously explored in The Great Gatsby where Jay Gatsby’s doomed attempt to use his wealth and influence to turn back time on a love affair leads to tragedy. It’s a tragedy that Fitzgerald sees as part of the human condition, summarized in the novel’s unforgettable final line: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Familial and Social Roles
Whether moving forward or in reverse, age is a defining feature of shifting roles in families and societies. Fitzgerald’s de-aging fantasy leads to surprisingly relatable outcomes that ring true. It’s not so much Benjamin’s age that causes friction with those around him, but it’s his appearance and whether that appearance matches expectations.
As a baby with thin white hair and a long gray beard, Benjamin causes problems for his parents because of their concern for the opinions of Baltimore society. The more they can manage the appearance—through clothing and hair dye—the more accepting they become of their son. He’s most comfortable in the presence of his grandfather, an indication of how age matters less than appearance in his family relations.
Family acceptance is no longer a problem when Benjamin de-ages to the point of looking like his father. Now that he has a proper role in his family he can assume a role in society, attending a dance with his father where he meets his future wife, Hildegarde. She too is concerned with apparent age, pleased to marry a man who looks to be in his fifties and refusing to believe that his real age could differ from his appearance.
But appearances can be deceiving, and as the years pass Fitzgerald shows how the meaning of age is tied up not only with familial and social roles but with gender roles as well. A woman who appears to be (and in this case is) 50 is considered to be past her prime, already progressing in the “eternal inertia” (186) that eventually envelops us all. Benjamin is still growing younger, having more fun than ever, and finding that success in life is predicated on the correspondence of age and appearance; he is in his prime.
When Benjamin enters his later years, age and appearance are divorced again, and his fraught relations with his father reoccur in reverse with his son. As father and son pass each other in opposite directions, Roscoe finds that the youthful-looking Benjamin is a threat to his social standing. He eventually is forced into the embarrassing role of caregiver, providing Benjamin with his own son’s nurse and sending them to the same kindergarten. The father-son role reversal is another poignant example of the real-world insights generated by Fitzgerald’s fantasy-world concept, highlighting the challenges adult children face when they become caregivers and decision-makers for their aging parents as well as the challenges of the elderly as they become dependent on those who once depended on them.
Free Will Versus Destiny
After arriving home from the Spanish-American War in his prime, Benjamin is confronted about his appearance by Hildegarde who regards him with “scorn” and suggests his youthful appearance is nothing “to boast about.” “I should think you’d have enough pride to stop it,” she tells him. “How can I?” he responds (187). Hildegarde implies that Benjamin has a choice about whether to age, and that he’s choosing incorrectly out of vanity. As he continues to insist that he “can’t help it,” she concludes that he can but is refusing because he's “simply stubborn” (188).
The sense that aging could be stopped if only one wanted it enough haunts many people, manifesting in a range of behaviors from participating in anti-aging health trends on one end of the spectrum to extreme elective cosmetic surgeries on the other. Almost everyone is searching, to some degree, for a fountain of youth, despite time’s inescapable fate. Benjamin’s responses to Hildegarde voice the painful truth that aging is an unavoidable destiny; people are trapped in time.
Their son Roscoe also objects to his father’s de-aging. He criticizes Benjamin for growing younger in terms that reek of industry, objectivity, and masculinity. He says Benjamin is being “inefficient” and not behaving “like a ‘red-blooded he-man’” (193). Roscoe is now in successful middle age, when personal will (for someone of Roscoe’s social position) can be rewarded by positive outcomes. He’s immersed in a culture that imbues willpower with intoxicating connotations of masculinity.
Roscoe earlier warned Benjamin to “turn right around and start back the other way” because the process of de-aging “has gone too far to be a joke. It isn’t funny any longer” (190). Where Hildegarde had accused Benjamin of acting from a lack of pride, Roscoe charges him with trying to be funny and failing as a man. Indeed, the story that began with the comical image of an elderly man spilling out of a tiny crib has ceased to be “funny any longer” and is now confronting the tragic limits of human agency in the face of time’s overwhelming power.
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