Paris, a year and a half after the Stock Crash Market of 1929. If we look through the window of the Ritz Hotel bar, we can see a middle-aged American man talking with the bartender in a late rainy afternoon. His name is Charlie Wales, and he is the main character of Fitzgerald’s Babylon revisited. This is the short story I will be analysing in the following lines, in order to understand how this tale is a metaphor of the American society’s mentality that came along with the beginning of the Great Depression after the Stock Crash Market: moral debts, the feeling of guilt, the pursue of self-redemption.
"I heard that you lost a lot in the crash."
"I did," and he added grimly, "but I lost everything I wanted in the boom." (F.Scott Fitzgerald, 1931)
Those are the first two lines of S. Scott Fitzgerald’s Babylon revisited, and as we continue reading the story, we realize that it is not merely the dialogue that opens the narration but the essence of the whole tale condensed at its very beginning: guilt, disappointment, the pursue of redemption. This conversation is held between Charlie Wales, a middle-aged American business man and a bartender in the Ritz Hotel, in Paris.
Charlie has returned to Paris …show more content…
These ideas of penance and self redemption that persecute Charlie and the reasons that have led him back to Paris are deeply interrelated: two years ago, in the buoyant Paris of the Roaring Twenties, Charlie was an alcoholic man, who had made a lot of money in the years of the market stock rise, married to a quite emotionally unstable woman named Helen. The couple lived a carefree life full of parties, excesses and waste, that ended up abruptly after losing their money in the Stock Market Crash of 1929. From that moment on, the couple’s life and marriage had declined until Helen’s
"I heard that you lost a lot in the crash."
"I did," and he added grimly, "but I lost everything I wanted in the boom." (F.Scott Fitzgerald, 1931)
Those are the first two lines of S. Scott Fitzgerald’s Babylon revisited, and as we continue reading the story, we realize that it is not merely the dialogue that opens the narration but the essence of the whole tale condensed at its very beginning: guilt, disappointment, the pursue of redemption. This conversation is held between Charlie Wales, a middle-aged American business man and a bartender in the Ritz Hotel, in Paris.
Charlie has returned to Paris …show more content…
These ideas of penance and self redemption that persecute Charlie and the reasons that have led him back to Paris are deeply interrelated: two years ago, in the buoyant Paris of the Roaring Twenties, Charlie was an alcoholic man, who had made a lot of money in the years of the market stock rise, married to a quite emotionally unstable woman named Helen. The couple lived a carefree life full of parties, excesses and waste, that ended up abruptly after losing their money in the Stock Market Crash of 1929. From that moment on, the couple’s life and marriage had declined until Helen’s