The mood of “Benjamin Button” shifts from funny and entertaining at the beginning of the story to contemplative and melancholy at the end. The beginning of the story is extremely comical as Roger Button comes to terms with the fact that his newborn son has the body and mind of a curmudgeonly 70-year-old man. Take, for example, the moment when Roger spots his son in the nursery of the hospital:
There was no mistake—he was gazing at a man of threescore and ten—a baby of threescore and ten, a baby whose feet hung over the sides of the crib in which it was reposing.
This moment is meant to make readers laugh as they imagine a man “of threescore and ten” (or, seventy years old) jammed into a crib with his “feet [hanging] over the sides.”
The humorous mood continues for the first half of the story or so, as Benjamin and Roger navigate the public’s constant misconceptions about Benjamin's age. The mood begin to shift, however, once Benjamin starts feeling the negative consequences of his condition—he loses interest in his wife Hildegarde as she gets older, is unable to play football at college the way he could at the beginning, cannot re-join the army because he is too young, and ultimately loses all of his memories and cognitive abilities. At the end of the story, the mood is markedly different from the start, as seen in the following passage:
He did not remember. 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.
The language here lacks any irony or playfulness and the sentences are shorter—“He did not remember,” “When he was hungry he cried—that was all”—communicating Benjamin’s limited cognitive capacity as well as the sadness of his impending death. There is a poignancy to Fitzgerald’s descriptions of these final days of Benjamin’s life, as he encourages readers to consider the sad fact that, for all people, as for Benjamin, there will come a day when they, too, “remember nothing.”
The mood of “Benjamin Button” shifts from funny and entertaining at the beginning of the story to contemplative and melancholy at the end. The beginning of the story is extremely comical as Roger Button comes to terms with the fact that his newborn son has the body and mind of a curmudgeonly 70-year-old man. Take, for example, the moment when Roger spots his son in the nursery of the hospital:
There was no mistake—he was gazing at a man of threescore and ten—a baby of threescore and ten, a baby whose feet hung over the sides of the crib in which it was reposing.
This moment is meant to make readers laugh as they imagine a man “of threescore and ten” (or, seventy years old) jammed into a crib with his “feet [hanging] over the sides.”
The humorous mood continues for the first half of the story or so, as Benjamin and Roger navigate the public’s constant misconceptions about Benjamin's age. The mood begin to shift, however, once Benjamin starts feeling the negative consequences of his condition—he loses interest in his wife Hildegarde as she gets older, is unable to play football at college the way he could at the beginning, cannot re-join the army because he is too young, and ultimately loses all of his memories and cognitive abilities. At the end of the story, the mood is markedly different from the start, as seen in the following passage:
He did not remember. 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.
The language here lacks any irony or playfulness and the sentences are shorter—“He did not remember,” “When he was hungry he cried—that was all”—communicating Benjamin’s limited cognitive capacity as well as the sadness of his impending death. There is a poignancy to Fitzgerald’s descriptions of these final days of Benjamin’s life, as he encourages readers to consider the sad fact that, for all people, as for Benjamin, there will come a day when they, too, “remember nothing.”
