The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1922

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Literary Devices

Fantasy and Magical Realism

“Benjamin Button” is one of four stories categorized as “Fantasies” in the annotated Table of Contents of Tales of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald saw interesting comic possibilities in the form. He employs the fantasy genre as a narrative frame within which he draws an otherwise realistic world in descriptive, factual prose. In his essay “The Significance of Fantasy in Fitzgerald’s Short Fiction,” Lawrence Buell observes that “fantasy in Fitzgerald usually involves an interplay or tension between the sense of a ‘real world’ and the sense of an anti-world of the implausible or the outlandish” (Buell, Lawrence. The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Jackson R. Bryer. University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). Benjamin is caught in such a tension, moving outlandishly backward in age while time moves realistically forward.

The unnamed narrator in “Benjamin Button” carries on as though describing a plausible series of events, only briefly addressing the unusual nature of Benjamin’s condition in the story’s first paragraph before assuredly proceeding to “tell you what occurred, and let you judge for yourself” (169). The contrast of fantastical premise and believable world-building makes this story an instance of magical realism, a subgenre of fantasy literature.

Fitzgerald’s use of fantasy in the Jazz Age stories suggests a satirical perspective on the burgeoning class-conscious culture he described in his early short fiction. “Benjamin Button” appeared (in original publication date and in the Jazz Age collection) directly beside “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” Both stories uncover the dark underpinnings of inherited wealth and social striving, casting a skeptical eye on an aristocracy that Fitzgerald found fascinating and would continue to deconstruct in his masterpiece The Great Gatsby.

Chiastic Structure

“Benjamin Button” achieves an impressive unity of form and content through its chiastic story structure. Chiasmus is a term from rhetoric that refers to phrases that create an inverted mirroring of elements. It’s often found in effective speeches, as in John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” And it is sometimes employed in memorable lyrics, like in Nirvana’s song “Smells Like Teen Spirit”: “I found it’s hard, it’s hard to find.”

Chiasmus also refers to large-scale narrative structures that, like chiastic phrases, create balanced, mirroring reversals. In Benjamin Button, the chiastic structure can be seen in his relationships as well as in his experience of aging at the opposite extremes of life. His relationships follow a pattern of chiastic inversions. As a son, he embarrasses his father, and as a father, he embarrasses his son. As a grandson, he connects with his grandfather, and as a grandfather, he connects with his grandson. His wife is attracted to him when he appears 30 years older than her; his wife is unattractive to him when she appears 30 years older than him.

The reversals in his relationships are recapitulated by his experience of aging. He begins life in a crib as an elderly baby with no memories or sense of who he is. He ends life in a crib as an infantile old man with no memories or sense of who he is. As a toddler, he is bored by the same kindergarten activities that as an old man he finds engrossing. At 12, he has outgrown his trousers, but at 57, he is too small for his military uniform.

These mirror images from the beginning and end of the story align perfectly with Benjamin’s personal history because it is a birth-to-death panorama of time running in one direction and age running at the same speed in the opposite direction. The narrative form is identical to the narrative content.

Narration and Point of View

The story is told by a first-person omniscient narrator, meaning that the speaker has a God-like view of the story and is not limited to any individual character’s perspective. The narrator’s assured voice contributes to the air of magical realism by lending credence to the fantasy and thereby allowing readers to accept the magic.

But the first-person framing is somewhat unusual. The overwhelming majority of the story is told as if from a third-person perspective, referring to characters as “he” and “she” and “they” as opposed to the “I” and “you” and “we” that readers typically expect from a first-person narrator. In fact, the first-person, whoever it is, only appears at the very beginning of the story and is already outside of the narrative itself, not a character within it. In the first two paragraphs, the narrator sets up the action by insisting that he or she is relating all the facts but acknowledges that they are “astonishing” and suggests that “you,” the reader, should “judge for yourself” (169). From there forward, the narration proceeds to the end as if in the third-person.

Fitzgerald’s technique raises the question of who the “I” is of the first two paragraphs. The slippery nature of the speaker casts into question the implied omniscient voice, suggesting this is one of Fitzgerald’s notorious unreliable narrators, the most famous being Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald playfully underscores the impossibility of his fantasy and at the same time invites the reader to believe it enough to see the deeper truths of aging and time.

Allusion

Fitzgerald was a well-read and clever writer who often employed allusions to add reverberations to his fictions. Two connected allusions in “Benjamin Button” raise interesting questions of race and paternity. After meeting his son Benjamin for the first time, Roger Button imagines the humiliation he will feel leaving the hospital and walking through town with this old man. He envisions walking past the “slave market” of antebellum Baltimore. The narrator says that upon seeing this mental image, “for a dark instant Mr. Button wished passionately that his son was black” (173).

There is a two-fold allusion here. The vision of the “slave market” seems to give Roger the idea that if his son were Black, he could rid himself of him by selling him, a reference to the trade in human beings legal at the time of Benjamin’s birth. But how could Benjamin have been born Black? Only if the father were not Roger but rather a man of African descent. (Another possibility is that Roger is multiracial. He could be passing as white and wishing that his son had a darker complexion.) The highly charged racist fear of being cuckolded by a Black man was a source of white supremacist terrorism throughout the 19th and well into the 20th century. But here, Roger is actively wishing that it were the case. That is the extent of his horror at Benjamin’s birth.

A similar allusion occurs later when Benjamin and Hildegarde announce their engagement. Their apparent age disparity sets off wild speculation in Baltimore society about Benjamin’s provenance, leading some to suggest that “he had two small conical horns sprouting from his head” (184). This is another allusion to cuckoldry, a horned figure being symbolic of a husband whose wife is sleeping with other men. These twin allusions point to anxieties of masculinity, parentage, and perception that run throughout Benjamin’s tale.