The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories Read Online Free Page B

dream’s collapse suggests the thematic framework for many of the stories in Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age . The bulk of these stories are concerned with life as staged, and they either capture a glimpse of life at a point of crucial transition—often the point at which youth vanishes—or they trace lives passing through states of transition marked by repeated symbolic encounters. Throughout his career, and in these stories, Fitzgerald views life as theater, and the plot as articulated around those moments of awakening from the dream of life.
    This existential trope informs stories as diverse as “Head and Shoulders,” “The Cut-Glass Bowl,” “The Four Fists,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “ ‘O Russet Witch!’,” and “The Lees of Happiness.” In “The Four Fists,” the protagonist, Samuel Meredith, an otherwise fairly ordinary man, encounters and inflicts violence at four crucial stages of his life, and at each stage learns lessons of humility, courage, or generosity. Similarly, in “ ‘O Russet Witch!’,” a quiet bookstore salesman, Merlin Grainger, on several occasions throughout his life encounters a mysterious femme fatale who, it turns out, was the one on earth destined for him, yet who he was too confused or cowardly—too distracted by life’s ordinariness—to pursue. The story concludes with Merlin’s recognition of how he has wasted his life: “But it was too late. He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, has wasted earth.”
    In “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Head and Shoulders,” Fitzgerald tests the thesis that life is a theater upon which is staged a series of trials and disillusionments. The ironic reversals that befall the protagonists of the stories can appear to be the kind of contrivances found by Fitzgerald’s immediate predecessors in popular magazine fiction, such as Frank R. Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger?” or O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.” It is not surprising that “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” would have been chosen as the basis for a major motion picture, for at first glance it appears to be a simple, aptly cinematic fantasy of a man born old and growing younger—the inverse of life’s normal arc. In fact the story is a complex portrayal of life conceived as a journey, and of the symmetries to be found between being born and dying. Benjamin Button “grows down” as his life evolves, and the device of portraying him becoming younger with each passing year allows Fitzgerald to address with humor a number of themes that he wrote about throughout his career: the place of the individual within the class and generation that he inhabits, the callowness of youth and the combined wisdom and frailty of old age, the transience of fashion, and the imposing force of history. In this curious story, Fitzgerald is preparing the way for such novels as The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night , whose protagonists are in search of eternal youth and a sense of permanence in a world of shifting realities and aging bodies. In “Head and Shoulders,” Fitzgerald traces the marriage of a cerebral philosopher, who imagines a brilliant academic career, and his athletic wife, who is a nightclub dancer. As they grow older, they change places: she becomes renowned as a popular writer—the Samuel Pepys of the Jazz age—while he descends, becoming an acrobat at the Hippodrome. As in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” the plot device used in “Head and Shoulders” to follow the reversed careers of the marriage partners reveals the discordant, quasiaccidental relation between individual desire and historical progress that sweeps up individuals