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

into its own plots. The prospect is essentially ironic, and in many of these stories Fitzgerald depicts life’s career as on a downward trajectory from the moment that youthful dreams begin to fade in the backwash of youth’s extravagances.
    In his stories of a fashionable age Fitzgerald is also concerned to capture youth as an evanescent state that inversely reflects the values of the age, while serving as the most visible sign of its passing. In stories such as “The Offshore Pirate,” “The Ice Palace,” “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” “Benediction,” “The Jelly-Bean,” and “The Camel’s Back”—stories of failed or endangered courtships, friendships, amorous relations—Fitzgerald portrays the crisis of youth as one in which decisions must be made that bind one over to fate and temporality. In this form of theatricalization, youth is often viewed as an interruption of or transient state within the flow of time and the passing of fashion. It is not innocent but gestational, and the signs of gestation are sudden and frenetic: the precipitous barbering of Bernice’s hair on a bet; Lois’s, sudden decision to tear up a farewell message to her lover in “Benediction”; the comic, impetuous shifts of an engagement portrayed in an evening of dancing in “The Camel’s Back.” Fitzgerald suggests in these stories that every act of youth, however seemingly insignificant, has lifelong consequences; for from his perspective, youth is the stage of fate’s formation and the point at which dream becomes reality. As in the tale of a life’s career, these stories of youthful suddenness are set against the backdrop of a continuously changing and evolving social order of uncertain shape and direction; thus the acting out of individual desire and the formation of individual destiny comes into direct conflict with the larger, uncertain history of a world in which the patterns of fate have unraveled.
    Fitzgerald’s representation of history and the social order in his stories of a sped-up, fleeting age (the language itself points out the contradiction) must be placed within the context of the fallout from “the war to end all wars.” As many commentators on the Great War have noted, not only did nations and empires fall as the result of international conflict, the senses of social coherence and the orderly progress of history were annihilated by a conflagration that swept up millions in its unpredictable course. Born of what appeared in the aftermath to be a series of historical accidents, the Great War generated a belief that history itself was an accident—that the only constants were illusion, the extension of desire, and death. In the face of such assumptions, one response was the carpe diem philosophy that came to typify the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties.
    Fitzgerald’s stories exemplify this period, in the sense that they often accurately portray the stereotypes and prejudices of the age (witness in our view the unbearable racism of such apprentice stories as “The Offshore Pirate” with its grotesque depictions of black folk culture and servitude) as well as the historical currents that limn the actions and desires of his protagonists. Perhaps the two of Fitzgerald’s finest stories in this regard are “May Day” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” The former is a novella in which characters pursuing their own pleasures are brought into direct contact with the larger history of socialist labor movements in a street riot: Fitzgerald’s cinematic technique in this story enables him to conjoin seemingly disparate vignettes so that the narratives of the marginalized, the alienated, and the upwardly mobile are paralleled. In the allegory of “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” Fitzgerald relates the narrative of manifest destiny and westward expansion in the form of a fantasy