The Lost Generation Analysis

Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited” and the “Lost Generation” The word “The Lost Generation” is popularized by Ernest Hemingway, which refers to the young generation of writers after World War I. F. Scoot Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Hart Crane are artists of the “Lost Generation”. There are common characteristics of the artists of “Lost Generation”. They lived in Paris, lost their positions in their lives, addicted to alcohol and have party-centered lifestyles. They are affected by the war and it makes their writing style different from other generations, which makes them unique in the American Literary. Their works are also affected by their unique experience of war and their lifestyles. This is the beginning
“In The Great Gasby, published in 1925, Scott Fitzgerald writes about a disintegrating American marriage that, despite the gravest of outside challenges-the limitless quest of the romantic lover-and undoubtedly for most of the wrong reasons, nevertheless holds together” (Mentero 587). In “Babylon Revisited,” the decadent life breaks the marriage of Charlie Wales and Helen and takes away his life before. Charlie Wales is a father who wants her daughter’s custody. Even though in the end of the story, he may not win and he is still alone. Charlie Wales’s desire of regaining his child is similar to Gatsby’s desire of regaining Daisy in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (Sutton 165). They both hope that by winning the female, they will “recapture a happier, more innocent past and will somehow wipe out the intervening years when the female was not his” (Sutton 165). In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby wants to regain Daisy for his idealist past; even though the narrator tells him that he cannot repeat the past. Charlie Wales tries to regain his daughter to regain the uncomplicated virtues of his life (Sutton 165). He wants to fix his personal mistake and brings back the life before he destroys his marriage, which causes his wife death. Gatsby and Charlie both have a similar ending of losing the female they want. Both stories tell that the past is gone and never be
Charlie Wales tries to change his life but he is paying for what he has done in the past. He lost her daughter’s custody because his previous life and now he tries to win it back. The story of Charlie Wales is also a story of Fitzgerald and people who live in that time period. They are paying for their wasteful lives and irresponsible behavior. In the end, Wales says that “He wasn’t young any more, with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have by himself” (Fitzgerald 689). He has all these nice thoughts and imaginations of him living with her daughter happily, but all of these are not going to come true and he will live with these alone. His mistakes cannot be fixed and he is still paying for it. His failure of getting her daughter back is determined at the beginning of the story where he leaves Tom’s address for Duncan at the Ritz bar. When he almost gets his daughter back, his friends he used to get drunk with come to the guardian’s house and it reminds the guardians how he used to be (Fitzgerald 687). It is obvious that Charlie loves Honoria and that is the reason why he continually refuses the second drinks (Bryer 194). However, Bryer states that “His reluctance to accept his share of the blame for the destructive period in his past that placed Honoria in the custody of the Peterses, himself in a sanitarium and his wife, Helen, in an early grave, undercuts his