Though Fitzgerald is earnestly exploring concepts like aging and death in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” he is also satirizing certain aspects of American society. In particular, he is critiquing (humorously) the ways in which upper-class American society is obsessed with gossip and reputation without any regard for the truth.
Despite the fact that Benjamin does little to hide his condition over the course of the story—his father’s early attempts to make his septuagenarian child dress and act like a toddler are clearly ineffective and laughable—and despite the fact that Baltimore society is obsessed with gossip and scandal, no one ever seems to get his story right. Fitzgerald establishes early on that the Buttons are well-known in elite Baltimore circles, yet no one is able to remember, years later, that Roger Button’s wife once bore a 70-year-old son.
By the time that Benjamin is 20 years old (and appears to be 50), everyone in town assumes that he and his father are brothers. Later, when Benjamin attends Harvard, everyone at the school notices how he “seemed a little older than the other freshmen” and, by the time he’s a senior, “He became known as something of a prodigy—a senior who was surely no more than sixteen.” Despite the fact that Benjamin’s classmates have been with him for four years in a row, they are seemingly unable to remember that he is the same person who started school appearing older than everyone else.
Throughout the story, Fitzgerald includes high-society characters who routinely gossip about Benjamin but who are, at the same time, unable to even remember rumors that they themselves started. This is Fitzgerald's way of showing how rumors are almost never concerned with telling or understanding the truth about people.
