Return To Babylon - Analysis
"He would come back some day; they couldn’t make him pay forever. But he wanted his child, and nothing was much good now, beside that fact. He wasn’t young any more, with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have by himself. He was absolutely sure Helen wouldn’t have wanted him to be so alone."
The final paragraph in the story shows how much Charlie loved his daughter, and how much he needs her to complete his life. In "Babylon Revisited" Charlie was treated unfairly and should have won the custody of Honoria. Charlie’s regret of how he lived in the past is proved repeatedly throughout the story and even with the hardship of losing his wife and daughter, Charlie was still able to put his life back together. The mistakes he made in the past were not all his fault; there was a problem in the stock market that put a heavy burden on his shoulders. He has done more than enough to show Marion that he has changed and is capable of taking care of Honoria. However, the story may also be a bit biased considering that the narrator may not be a reliable person. There are also certain situations in the story, which questions Charlie’s sincerity about how much he has changed.
Charlie’s love for Honoria is the biggest reason for him to regain her custody. Throughout the story, Charlie has expressed how much he loves Honoria and how much he needs her in his life. Honoria also expresses how much she loves her father and how much she misses him. She tells her father more than once that she would rather live with him than with her Aunt Marion. To separate a father and daughter from each other is both devastating and cruel. It is hard to understand why Marion would not let Charlie have Honoria, when Honoria expresses so much love for her father.
"From behind the maid who opened the door darted a lovely little girl of nine who shrieked ‘Daddy!’ and flew up, struggling like a fish, into his arms. She pulled his head around by one ear and set her cheek against his.
‘My old pie,’ he said
‘Oh, daddy, daddy, daddy, dads, dads, dads!’
The narrator does not hesitate to show how much Honoria and Charlie care for each other. Though Honoria was just a little girl, growing up without a father is still harsh. Still her love for Charlie is unconditional, and questions about the past are not brought up. Their strong relationship is alm...
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...reliable is not a good enough reason for me to believe that Charlie is not responsible enough. I think that we have to give the narrator a certain amount of trust because he is the one telling the story and we have no other sources to compare with. If the narrator cannot be considered reliable then the story itself should not be trustworthy enough to read. So we must deal with the facts that are given to us and base most of the decisions on them. With this in mind I look at the situation evenly and try not to fully believe the narrator but still consider what he is saying. I understand that Charlie made a big mistake and hurt not only himself, but those that loved him. There is no excuse for what he did. However, I still believe that the strong bond that is between Honoria and Charlie is unbreakable. Being raised in a family where the strength of love has endured all types of hardships, I have experienced that nothing could ever sever those connections. Loving someone does not mean that Honoria or Marion should try to forget the mistakes Charlie had made or the heartaches he has given them. But instead, to love someone is to learn how to understand and most importantly to forgive.
To keep her daughter’s “virtue” intact Macaria beats her. In this way the mother establishes complete control over Marcela’s sexuali...
Charlie Wales focuses on his visit to Paris as an extended allegory, imposing a moral value on every place that he visits and incident that occurs. He is hoping to redeem himself from the period of drunken debauchery that led to the death of his wife and loss of his daughter to relatives’care. Whether he is driving through the streets of Montmartre, the site of many past revels, or trying to find a restaurant without past negative associations where he can have lunch with his daughter, the evils of the past form pictures in his mind. He wants to be worthy of custody of Honoria,
...fore the end of the story. The central question of whether or not Charlie would be able to take responsibility for Honoria was left unresolved by the end of the story.
Charlie’s sister didn’t appreciate Charlie in the beginning of the book, but came to love him and trust him as she did when she was younger. During the time Charlie’s sister was involved in an abusive relationship, Charlie unwittingly informed his parents of
Charlie became increasingly alarmed at leaving Honoria in this atmosphere of hostility against himself; sooner or later, it will come out in a word here, a shake of head there, and some of the distrust will be irrevocably implanted on Honoria"(13). It is not easy to leave your child with some one who you Know definitely does not like you. The father and Daughter bond is a strong bond and if it is destroyed at this early age it can become very difficult to restore it. Marion was very strongly biased against
Charlie begins to learn how society treats the mentally retarded. He realizes his old friends at the bakery just made fun of him. After watching the audience laugh at video of him before the operation, Charlie runs away from a mental health conference with Algernon after learning that his operation went wrong. Charlie does research on himself and learns that intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown. In many ways Charlie was better before the operation.
Since Sister was affected the most by certain actions of the family, Welty narrated this short story through Sister’s point of view to show how the function of the family declined through these actions. Sister was greatly affected when her sister broke the bonds of sisterhood by stealing her boyfriend and marrying him. Secondly, Sister was affected by the favoritism shown by her family towards her younger sister. Since her sister was favored more than her, this caused her to be jealous of her sister. For example, Sister shows a lot of jealousy by the tone she uses when describing what Stella-Rondo did with the bracelet that their grandfather gave her. Sister’s description was, “She’d always had anything in the world she wanted and then she’d throw it away. Papa-Daddy gave her this gorgeous Add-a-Pearl necklace when sh...
Early on we are lead to believe that Charlie and his father are happy to see each other and have a good relationship with quotes such as, “I was terribly happy to see him again” and “ Hi Charlie, Hi boy!” But these attitudes towards father and son are short lived.
In Nerves, Charlie is depicted as someone adrift on the sea of life. A decade removed from college he has failed to embrace even the thought of a career, choosing instead to settle for jobs that have flexible hours, a convenient location and discounts on photography supplies. To Charlie, a career is put in a category with pets and lawns, “people were always talking about them, and tending to them, but they just weren’t that interesting (pg.145)”. What does interest him is getting and holding the attention of his college sweetheart turned wife, Linda. The dilemma for Charlie is that Linda has been unhappy in their relationship for some time and he has been blissfully ignorant of that fact. In the story Charlie is depicted in the role of child to Linda’s mother in their marriage dynamic. Linda goes to school full-time so that she can have a career in architecture while Charlie works part-time in a camera store. It is made clear that she is exasperated because he doesn’t “…care if things are clean. It’s totally up to me (pg.162).” She feels the pressure of being the breadwinner in the family and is frustrated with his blissful ignorance and inability to make a contribution to the household. But he never thinks anything is wrong because “he didn’t know how to think of their marriage as troubled; it had always seemed to him that they got along very well –no fights (pg.161).” His lack of self-awareness and maturity blinded him to the clues that something was wrong but, like a child, he only knows someone is upset when they hear raised voices.
...e like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.” This explains why he will never have custody of his daughter. Because with split skin the repair is next to impossible. Charlie has not proven himself worthy enough to have the custody of his daughter. So the bond between him and his family is not gone. He has proven that he cannot be financially responsible since he lost all of him money during the crash, and lost everything during the boom. So in both stories the bond between a father and his child can be broken with a single act. Family has been a theme in these stories, but choosing weather or not to turn a life around or facing a lifetime of hatred is what a child will decide when comes to blood. Both fathers in these stories proved that not committing any more crimes, or losing the first nine years can be detrimental to child.
For Charlie, Ignorance is bliss. He realizes that his so called ? friends? were just using him to entertain their perverse humor. Also, he was also fired from the job that he loved so much because his new intelligence made those around him feel inferior and scared.
Throughout the novel, Charlie’s mother, Rose is portrayed as two people to him. Before Norma’s birth, Rose’s only wish is to make Charlie normal. She sends him to many doctors and tries to teach him how to act like he should. When Norma is born and Rose is sure that she is normal, she becomes abusive to Charlie and beats him if he does not act normal. Knowing that her son is abnormal, she starts reading books and magazines on the subject. She then believes that being tough on him and punishing him will help him improve and become like the others, and even better. When she gives up on trying to make him normal, she threatens to kill him if he does not get sent away. When gaining intelligence, Charlie is haunted by the memories: “It was Rose’s face that brought back the frightening memories. She was two people to me, and I never had a way of knowing which she would be” (Keyes 167). When he visits her, after being separated from his family for a long time, she is a different person. Charlie talks to Rose and tries to make her understand that he was the subject of an operation that made him intelligent. By saying this, Charlie wants her to be proud of him; however, she does not understand that. When Norma comes home, she is relieved and happy that her brother is back. She spends time talking to Charlie and catching up on the years they’ve
We can all sympathize with Charlie on the surface, we have all made mistakes that we have to live with. Charlie is attempting to move forward with his life and erase the mistakes of his past. The ghosts of his past torment him repeatedly throughout the story, his child's guardians despise him and his old friends do not understand him.
...of all responsibility (for, of course, there is no way that a normal person could ever kill.) In keeping with this principle the film attempts to absolve Young Charlie from all responsibility in her Uncle's death, for it is seen as an accident that occurred when Young Charlie was fighting her Uncle in self-defence. In the final stages of the film we are brought back to the small town introduced to us in the beginning, this time, however, it is in morning for a beloved son. Charlie's death has brought Graham back to Young Charlie. We can see the good side has won the battle for her. As in early situational Charlie has learned her moral lesson and the episode may end.
“Once I had believed in father, and the world had seemed small, and old. Now he was gone, and I wasn’t afraid to love him anymore. And the world seemed limitless.” Theroux wrote Charlie to become aware of his father, Allie Fox’s, obsession with becoming a God-like person in a perfect society, in a way that he realizes that this obsession is unhealthy. Charlie, in the beginning of the novel believes that his father is the greatest man alive because of the his inventions and his intelligence, yet throughout the novel Charlie becomes aware that his father is not the greatest. This happens because Allie Fox commits murder using his icebox invention, which in turn caused the natives to become enraged with Fox. At that point Charlie realizes that his father is not the greatest man alive, but instead that he caused great trouble on the island.