The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (short story)

"The days flowed on in monotonous content. He went back a third year to the kindergarten, but he was too little now to understand what the bright shining strips of paper were for.He cried because the other boys were bigger than he, and he was afraid of them. The teacher talked to him, but though he tried to understand he could not understand at all."

"He was taken from the kindergarten. His nurse, Nana... became the centre of his tiny world. On bright days they walked in the park; Nana would point at a great gray monster and say "elephant," and Benjamin would say it after her, and when he was being undressed for bed that night he would say it over and over aloud to her: "Elyphant, elyphant, elyphant." ...And when the long day was done at five o'clock he would go upstairs with Nana and be fed on oatmeal and nice soft mushy foods..."

"There were no troublesome memories in his childish sleep; no token came to him of his brave days at college, of the glittering years when he flustered the hearts of many girls. There were only the white, safe walls of his crib and Nana... and a great big orange ball that Nana pointed at just before his twilight bed hour and called "sun." When the sun went his eyes were sleepy—there were no dreams, no dreams to haunt him."

"The past—the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather—all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been."

"He did not remember clearly whether the milk was warm or cool at his last feeding or how the days passed—there was only his crib and Nana's familiar presence."

"And then he remembered nothing."

"When he was hungry he cried—that was all."

"Through the noons and nights he breathed and over him there were soft mumblings and murmurings that he scarcely heard, and faintly differentiated smells, and light and darkness."

"Then it was all dark, and his white crib and the dim faces that moved above him, and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out altogether from his mind."

"According to Fitzgerald, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” was written as a response to a quip by Mark Twain “to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end”..."

"Fitzgerald’s famous short story... is a work of magical realism... The principle is simple... an old man and “grew up” in reverse... It’s a wonderful idea, rife with comic potential and also allegorical possibility. ...[T]he story succeeds with a sense of gentle satire and no need for much in the way of flash. ...The tale is most touching at its end, where it even triggers an element of longing in the reader. ...Benjamin ...loses his memories in the way one sponges away the writing on a blackboard; it’s as if the life he lived hasn’t happened. ...The flippancy of Fitzgerald’s style maintains an emotional distance ...that treats the absurd and uncanny as plausible. ...Fitzgerald ...seems mainly interested in the reversal of the natural order and... in finding a way to thematize time’s relativity in a linear narrative. Oddly, “Benjamin Button” seems both of its time and ahead of it."

"Why are fiction writers so regularly engaged by the conceit of a back-to-front life? ...Of his mother nothing is heard except that she is "all right" after the prodigious delivery. Her absence reflects the chilly bloodlessness of this account..."