1. Babylon Revisited
김보섭
김종욱

2. Contents 1. Character List 2. Analysis of Major Characters
3. Theme, Motifs, and Symbols
4. Analysis

3. Character List
Charlie Wales -  The handsome, thirty-five-year-old protagonist of the story. Once worth a small fortune, Charlie spent all his money in Paris during the mid-1920s. An alcoholic, he collapsed along with the stock market in 1929.
Lincoln Peters -  Marion’s husband and Charlie’s brother-in-law.
Helen -  Charlie’s deceased wife.
Honoria Wales -  Charlie’s daughter. Honoria is a sunny, smart nine-year-old. She loves her father dearly and, although she is happy enough with Marion and Lincoln, wants to live with Charlie.
Marion Peters -  Charlie’s sister-in-law. Marion fixates on the night Charlie locked Helen out of the house during a snowstorm and believes he’s responsible for her death.

4. Analysis of Major Characters (1)
Charlie Wales
Despite his many flaws, Charlie is a man whom almost everyone can’t help but like. It’s surprising that Charlie’s so likeable considering his wild past of uncontrollable alcoholism, his possible complicity in his wife’s death, and the fact that he essentially abandoned his child. Charlie is hard to dislike in part because he seems so earnest in his efforts to turn over a new leaf. If we’re wary of him in the beginning of the story, we increasingly trust him as he rebuffs his former friends and sticks to just one drink a day. Fitzgerald also conveys Charlie’s great personal charm. Charlie is a physically attractive man, a quality that clearly affects Lorraine and possibly even Marion. He is also a winning, persuasive speaker, able to manipulate listeners without seeming to try.

5. Analysis of Major Characters (2)
Marion Peters
Marion acts both as a stand-in and a foil for the reader. On the one hand, we likely share all her reservations about Charlie. On the other hand, her off-putting personal qualities set us against her. We want to dismiss her reservations, even if we know we shouldn’t, which puts us even more firmly in Charlie’s camp. Marion is the mirror image of Charlie: although logic demands that we approve of her actions, her prickly personality masks her essential goodness and makes her difficult to like. Marion is unhappy with her own life and focuses her frustrations on Charlie, but there’s no doubt that she is a good woman. She has taken Honoria in, treated her as her own child, and brought her up to be a happy, self-sufficient girl. She also loves her husband. Her marriage to him is the most successful romantic adult relationship in the story, a stark contrast to Charlie’s disastrous marriage, which ended in senseless destruction. Still, Marion’s judgmental tone and slight air of irrationality make her an unsympathetic character. Because we see Marion from Charlie’s perspective, we focus only on her frustrations rather than her good motivations.

6. The Purity of Paternal Love
Theme
The Inescapability
Of the Past
Even though Charlie’s wilder days have long since passed, he’ll never be able to truly escape them. Although he actively tries to avoid reminders of the Paris he used to know, they nevertheless follow him everywhere. he begins and ends the story in the familiar Ritz bar. While these incidents suggest that the past still haunts Charlie, we can’t help thinking that Charlie is actually looking to be haunted. We know that some part of him must want the debauchery of the old days back in his life, thereby planting the seeds of his own failure.
The Purity of Paternal Love
Fitzgerald characterizes the love that fathers and daughters feel for each other as the only pure, unadulterated kind of love in the world.

7. Motifs and Symbols Motifs Symbols The Outdoors The Ritz Bar
Many scenes in “Babylon Revisited” take place on the streets of Paris, where people go when they’re lonely or angry. Charlie forces Lorraine and Duncan out onto the street, for example, when they surprise him at Marion and Lincoln’s house, and they leave in a fit of anger.
Fitzgerald emphasizes the melancholy quality of the outdoors by contrasting it with the indoors, which he portrays as warm, cozy, and safe.
Symbols
The Ritz Bar
The bar at the Ritz Hotel symbolizes Charlie’s spiritual home. Charlie is a wanderer: he no longer lives in America, his birthplace, and we never see him in Prague, his new home. He visits Marion and Lincoln’s house as an interloper, more of a resented outsider than a member of the family. The place that closest resembles his home, however, is the bar at the Ritz, and the story begins and ends there, emphasizing its importance to Charlie.

8. Babylon Revisited: Similarity to The Great Gatsby
In both works, the main character is trying to create a new identity. In the case of Jay Gatsby, he has reinvented himself by a name change and by becoming rich through criminal acts to win Daisy. In Charlie's instance, he has made a serious effort to reform to gain custody of Honoria.
Both The Great Gatsby and Babylon Revisited are also statements about the twenties, the pursuit of wealth and careless living of that generation. Gatsby's pursuit of wealth, hoping it will bring him happiness and fulfillment, is the embodiment of the American Dream gone wrong. Babylon Revisited makes a statement not only about Charlie's his personal dilemma but the irresponsible seeking of pleasure that was characteristic of the post-war Roaring Twenties generation.
Gatsby was published in Published in 1931, Babylon Revisited is a later work of Fitzgerald's. Fitzgerald died in 1940.

9. Source of research material