“Babylon Revisited” is a short story that tells of an American revisiting Paris after an absence of two years following the stock market crash of 1929, comparing what he sees now to the years prior to the Crash. “Babylon Revisited” by F. Scott Fitzgerald shows both Paris and Charlie Wales in distinct contrast; from wild, extravagant, and impulsive prior to the Crash of 1929 to sober, conservative, and reflective following the Crash.
The city in the pre-Crash years was prosperous, where rich Americans recklessly threw their money around, giving “thousand-franc notes given to an orchestra for playing a single number, hundred-franc notes tossed to a doorman for calling a cab” (XXX). Gaining wealth in the stock market, Charlie and his wife Helen,
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Walking the streets of Montmartre, entertainment businesses that once were thriving, where Charlie spent much time and money, now catered to only a few tourists and seem sleazy to him. Once considered all the rage, “he suddenly realized the meaning of the word “dissipate”–to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something” (XXX). Charlie’s recollections of the city and his own behavior in the pre-Crash days are not all nostalgic when “the memory of those days swept over him like a nightmare,” reminding him of his part in his wife’s eventual death when he recollects his erroneous belief in his own power due to wealth and privilege, telling of “The men who locked their wives out in the snow, because the snow of twenty-nine wasn’t real snow. If you didn’t want it to be snow, you just paid some money” (XXX). He returns to Paris sober, respectably employed by a firm in Prague, and attempts to gain back custody of his daughter. Reflectively, he acknowledges that “‘I lost everything I wanted in the boom’”