Sinclair Lewis Babbitt Character Analysis

For most of human history, people have spent their lives changing. Our ancestors lived very different lives from us, and our descendents are likely to also live different lives. However, sometimes change happens over a very long time, and one lifetime may not be enough experimenting with the world. There are many different ways to live today, but humans have settled into a single life without first seeing what else there is to do, and the pain of not knowing what the world has to offer can cause dissatisfaction among people from doing the same thing over and over again. Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis, shows some of the effects that doubting one’s own life may lead to. Babbitt was dissatisfied with his current life, but after going out and doing …show more content…
Over the years, the importance of his business and family were dumbed down because of the monotonous nature that these elements held. However, he realizes that his work and family are more important than anything when his wife leaves to go visit some of her family, leaving him without her. This time of separation causes him to realize her importance, and “as he began to drift away he also began to see her as a human being… and he compassionated that husband-and-wife relationship which, in twenty-five years of married life, had become a separate and real entity” (313). It took a change from the normal of her always being there to him always being able to go with his younger, more rebellious circle to make him realize how the life he thought he wanted to have was not the life for him. A few weeks after Myra returns, he finds himself dissatisfied again, but he starts ignoring the calls of Tanis Judique, a middle aged, rebellious woman whom Babbitt had become infatuated with, and in a meeting with her, breaks off their relationship entirely. Babbitt’s true regaining of his life takes place as a result of Myra’s hospitalization. Babbitt’s wife starts having pains in her abdomen, and it turns out that she will have to get a surgery; something like this has not happened to Babbitt and his family before. As a result, Babbitt fears that she will be gone again, but this time, for the rest of his life. Babbitt mends his relationship with Myra while she is in the hospital over the course of seventeen days, and his friends who had abandoned him earlier for his changing views stretch out a shoulder for him to lean on. When Myra asks Babbitt if he would abandon her again to visit his friends, he answers, “Old honey, I love you more than anything in the world! I 've kind of been worried by business and everything, but that 's all over now, and