Theme Of Identity In Fitzgerald's Story

The Significance of Identity in Fitzgerald’s’ Stories

Throughout the 1920s, Francis Scott Fitzgerald composed stories that told the truths of the Roaring 20’s and the Jazz Age, changing American Literature by giving hid audience the social truths and “that’s-just-the-way-it-is” (Bruccoli.) form of writing. In Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” the illusion of appearance rather than identity leads to jealousy and bewilderment. To develop this thematic idea, Fitzgerald uses imagery, characterization, and irony to demonstrate his characters’ situations with appearance and identity.

Fitzgerald began his interest in girls at an early age. As a child, he attended a dance school where he became fond of all the girls, having multiple “girlfriends”, often buying each of them gifts and writing them notes and buying them small gifts (Scott.). As a result to his success with girls, Fitzgerald wrote his younger sister, Annabel, a set of instructions on how to attract boys. These instructions later appeared in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”(1920) to help the protagonist, Bernice, become attractive and flirtatious with the help of her cousin, Marjorie (Scott.). In the early 1920s, once he got married and moved to New York City, Fitzgerald’s stories mostly featured flappers and party themes. As time progressed, those flapper stories were moved to the ““trash” section to show he was a serious writer” (Bruccoli.) and his stories became more about the tales of young men and the effects of power, money, and partying (Scott.).

In the first story, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”, a socially awkward girl named Bernice is tired of being uncomfortable at country club balls and parties. To help her become flirty and charmi...

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...tion. In the ballroom at the country club, a young man “knew as much about the psychology of women as he did of the mental states of Buddhist contemplatives” (Fitzgerald.), adding humor to the fancy setting and situation with verbal irony. By adding interesting figurative language such a irony, Fitzgerald’s stories “ are smoothly paced and hold the reader attention” (Callahan.). In “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, Benjamin is an outcast with a witty sense of humor, so the author adds different types of irony. Fitzgerald adds situational irony by describing in the beginning how the “proper thing to be born at home” (Fitzgerald), yet Benjamin was born at the hospital and as they would soon find out, Benjamin had far from the proper, standard birth. Benjamin was not a typical child, for Fitzgerald uses verbal irony to say “the rattle bored him” (Fitzgerald.).