These pas t two day have been really hectic for me since I had 3 tests in 2 days. I wasn’t going to read super in depth into this story but after reading some analysis of this story, I stayed up a little later than expected and read. The impression that I got from the story was that a common theme was fitting in.
It seemed like all the Button family wanted was for Benjamin to fit in, but considering his condition, that would never happen. When he was “younger” but looked like an old man, his father wanted him to act like a baby and play with a rattle and when he was older but looked like a child, his son wanted him to act like an old man and wear whiskers. It seemed like the outside world wanted Benjamin to fit in, but he never was going to. That is really common today also. Children are constantly trying to get along with their peers by playing the same games and wearing the same outfits. It only gets worse when kids try their hardest to be in the “popular crowd”. Girls start buying expensive clothing, wearing more makeup than necessary, and develop eating disorders to be skinny. The saddest part is, this process continues throughout adult life. You see more and more people getting plastic surgery so they can look better and change for society. People are constantly trying to be like everyone else, but not Benjamin. He accepted the fact that he was different from everyone else and embraced his differences. The only problem was, the people around him would not accept those differences.
This short story also brings up the fantasy that everyone has; the idea of aging in reverse, getting younger as you get older. He was the envy of everyone is society. Yet, Fitzgerald puts a twist on this story where his early years as an old man and later years as a child are filled with annoyance. His father was ashamed of him because he looked like an old man but should be a baby and Benjamin’s son, Roscoe, was annoyed since Benjamin looked like a boy but should be a grandfather. Clearly, Benjamin’s peak years were from 50-20 where he met his wife, Hildegard. Yet, that became troubled too when Benjamin kept getting younger but his wife got older. He became to hate how she wanted to stay in at night and became more of a chaperone at parties whereas he was the life of it. Their marriage ended when she moved to France because of their differences due to maturity and technically age. It seemed like from then on everything that Benjamin began ended badly. His time at Harvard started off great and he was the star football player and top of his class, but as he got younger he got scrawnier and could barely make the team, schoolwork also became much more difficult. Basically, Benjamin did life backwards and was never quite at the right place at the right time, making aging oppositely more of a curse than a blessing.
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