Perhaps the most tragic aspect of Benjamin Button’s life is that nobody supports or cares for him in meaningful ways. From the moment he’s born, the very people who one might expect to comfort him and ease him into the world—people like his parents and the nurses at the hospital—focus solely on his condition (which causes him to age backwards) and how it might impact their lives. And although Benjamin’s father, Mr. Button, eventually takes care of him, Mr. Button doesn’t necessarily give Benjamin the kind of unconditional love and support that one might expect from a parent. The same lack of support is evident in Benjamin’s eventual relationship with his wife, Hildegarde, who abandons him later in life because she can’t accept that he gets younger as she gets older. And as the years go by, Benjamin needs more and more support because he loses (rather than gains) maturity, but he lacks caring relationships with family or friends. By the time he lives the life of a little boy, for example, he has nobody to turn to except his own son, Roscoe—and even he fails to give Benjamin the emotional support he needs. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is thus a story about how lonely it is to live without the supporting relationships that normally help people through life.
As a child, Benjamin does receive support from his parents, but it’s tainted by their hesitancy to come to terms with his reverse-aging condition. Although they provide him with food, shelter, clothing, and financial stability, they don’t necessarily nurture him or give him legitimate emotional support. This is evident very early in Benjamin’s life, when he grabs hold of his father’s hand (instead of the other way around) on the walk home from the hospital and asks what his name will be. In this moment, it’s clear that Benjamin yearns for the kind of parental guidance and care that most people automatically give their children. Later, even though Benjamin has been living at home for several years, his father keeps accidentally addressing him as “Mr.” and is “always somewhat in awe of him,” almost as if he’s not his son at all. In other words, Mr. Button is so preoccupied with Benjamin’s unique medical condition that there’s a very clear emotional distance between him and his son—ultimately depriving Benjamin of a fully engaged father figure.
Fortunately for Benjamin, he’s able to find emotional support when he experiences genuine love in his relationship with Hildegarde—but she, too, eventually fails to support him. This is so gratifying to him that it’s as if he’s “blind with enchantment,” feeling as if his life is “just beginning”—a testament to just how badly he yearned for true love and affection. But these feelings fade as Benjamin continues to age backwards, a process that reveals that Hildegarde isn’t actually someone who will give him unconditional support and love. Rather, she resents him for getting younger, chastising him for continuing to age in reverse, despite the obvious fact that he can’t do anything to stop this process. To be fair, by this point in his life, Benjamin isn’t a particularly good spouse, either. He becomes less and less interested in Hildegarde as he gets younger, and in keeping with this, also stops considering how his actions will make her feel. All the same, though, the fact remains that Hildegarde refuses to stand by Benjamin, failing to be there for him as he worries about what will happen if his reverse aging process continues at such a rapid pace. Once again, then, he finds himself having to go through hardship without any meaningful emotional support.
Eventually, Benjamin experiences a role reversal when his own son, Roscoe, becomes his caretaker—but Roscoe shirks this duty, leaving Benjamin without any meaningful relationships toward the end of his life. This happens after Roscoe has become a successful businessman and Benjamin has become a young boy. But Roscoe doesn’t want to take care of his father, meaning that he’s yet another one of Benjamin’s loved ones who fails to give him the unconditional affection that he needs. This reversal of the caretaking role resembles something that actually happens quite frequently in real life. Many adult children find that they’re the ones who have to take care of their elderly parents, some of whom need the same kind of attention as helpless children. In this way, Benjamin’s story invites readers to reflect on the way that caretaking roles can come full-circle. In Benjamin’s case, though, Roscoe doesn’t necessarily return the favor by showing his father the support Benjamin presumably showed him as a child. Instead, he hires a nurse to care for his father at the end of Benjamin’s life, pawning off the responsibility on a stranger. In doing so, he ruins the possibility that Benjamin will finally be able to enjoy a genuinely loving, caring relationship before he dies.
Given that nobody in Benjamin’s life ever provides him with true support, it’s fitting that he ends up dying without anyone other than a hired nurse, Nana, to comfort him on his passage out of the world. And though he isn’t aware of this because he has the undeveloped mind of a baby, it’s clear that his life was defined by a profound lack of loving support—a lack that ultimately led him to a very lonely end.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Support and Caretaking ThemeTracker
Support and Caretaking Quotes in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Roger Buttons held an enviable position, both social and financial, in ante-bellum Baltimore. They were related to the This Family and the That Family, which, as every Southerner knew, entitled them to membership in that enormous peerage which largely populated the Confederacy. This was their first experience with the charming old custom of having babies—Mr. Button was naturally nervous. He hoped it would be a boy so that he could be sent to Yale College in Connecticut, at which institution Mr. Button himself had been known for four years by the somewhat obvious nickname of “Cuff.”
The cool perspiration redoubled on Mr. Button’s forehead. He closed his eyes, and then, opening them, looked again. 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.
The old man looked placidly from one to the other for a moment, and then suddenly spoke in a cracked and ancient voice. “Are you my father?” he demanded.
Mr. Button and the nurse started violently.
“Because if you are,” went on the old man querulously, “I wish you’d get me out of this place—or, at least, get them to put a comfortable rocker in here.”
“This is a fine place to keep a youngster of quiet tastes. With all this yelling and howling, I haven’t been able to get a wink of sleep. I asked for something to eat”—here his voice rose to a shrill note of protest—“and they brought me a bottle of milk!”
Mr. Button sank down upon a chair near his son and concealed his face in his hands. “My heavens!” he murmured, in an ecstasy of horror. “What will people say? What must I do?”
A grotesque picture formed itself with dreadful clarity before the eyes of the tortured man—a picture of himself walking through the crowded streets of the city with this appalling apparition stalking by his side. “ I can’t. I can’t,” he moaned.
People would stop to speak to him, and what was he going to say? He would have to introduce this—this septuagenarian: “This is my son, born early this morning.” And then the old man would gather his blanket around him and they would plod on, past the bustling stores, the slave market—for a dark instant Mr. Button wished passionately that his son was black—past the luxurious houses of the residential district, past the home for the aged. . . .
If, say, he could only find a very large boy’s suit, he might cut off that long and awful beard, dye the white hair brown, and thus manage to conceal the worst, and to retain something of his own self-respect—not to mention his position in Baltimore society.
But a frantic inspection of the boys’ department revealed no suits to fit the new-born Button. He blamed the store, of course—in such cases it is the thing to blame the store.
“They look sort of funny to me,” he complained. “I don’t want to be made a monkey of—”
“You’ve made a monkey of me!” retorted Mr. Button fiercely. “Never you mind how funny you look. Put them on—or I’ll—or I’ll spank you.” He swallowed uneasily at the penultimate word, feeling nevertheless that it was the proper thing to say.
“All right, father”—this with a grotesque simulation of filial respect—“you’ve lived longer; you know best. Just as you say.”
As before, the sound of the word “father” caused Mr. Button to start violently.
The remaining brush of scraggly hair, the watery eyes, the ancient teeth, seemed oddly out of tone with the gayety of the costume. Mr. Button, however, was obdurate—he held out his hand. “Come along!” he said sternly.
His son took the hand trustingly. “What are you going to call me, dad?” he quavered as they walked from the nursery—“just ‘baby’ for a while? till you think of a better name?”
Mr. Button grunted. “I don’t know,” he answered harshly. “I think we’ll call you Methuselah.”
But Mr. Button persisted in his unwavering purpose. Benjamin was a baby, and a baby he should remain. At first he declared that if Benjamin didn’t like warm milk he could go without food altogether, but he was finally prevailed upon to allow his son bread and butter, and even oatmeal by way of a compromise. One day he brought home a rattle and, giving it to Benjamin, insisted in no uncertain terms that he should “play with it,” whereupon the old man took it with a weary expression and could be heard jingling it obediently at intervals throughout the day.
When he was five he was sent to kindergarten, where he was initiated into the art of pasting green paper on orange paper, of weaving colored maps and manufacturing eternal cardboard necklaces. He was inclined to drowse off to sleep in the middle of these tasks, a habit which both irritated and frightened his young teacher. To his relief she complained to his parents, and he was removed from the school. The Roger Buttons told their friends that they felt he was too young.
By the time he was twelve years old his parents had grown used to him. Indeed, so strong is the force of custom that they no longer felt that he was different from any other child—except when some curious anomaly re- minded them of the fact.
“I’ve always said,” went on Hildegarde, “that I’d rather marry a man of fifty and be taken care of than marry a man of thirty and take care of him.”
“Well,” he remarked lightly, “everybody says I look younger than ever.”
Hildegarde regarded him with scorn. She sniffed. “Do you think it’s anything to boast about?”
“I’m not boasting,” he asserted uncomfortably.
She sniffed again. “The idea,” she said, and after a moment: “I should think you’d have enough pride to stop it.”
“How can I?” he demanded.
“I’m not going to argue with you,” she retorted. “But there’s a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you’ve made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don’t suppose I can stop you, but I really don’t think it’s very considerate.”
But though he was welcomed in a general way, there was obviously no heartiness in Roscoe’s feeling toward him—there was even perceptible a tendency on his son’s part to think that Benjamin, as he moped about the house in adolescent mooniness, was somewhat in the way. Roscoe was married now and prominent in Baltimore life, and he wanted no scandal to creep out in connection with his family.
“And another thing,” continued Roscoe, “when visitors are in the house I want you to call me ‘Uncle’—not ‘Roscoe,’ but ‘Uncle,’ do you understand? It looks absurd for a boy of fifteen to call me by my first name. Perhaps you’d better call me ‘Uncle’ all the time, so you’ll get used to it.”
With a harsh look at his father, Roscoe turned away. . . .
Roscoe took them both to kindergarten on the same day and Benjamin found that playing with little strips of colored paper, making mats and chains and curious and beautiful designs, was the most fascinating game in the world.
Roscoe’s son moved up into the first grade after a year, but Benjamin stayed on in the kindergarten. He was very happy. Sometimes when other tots talked about what they would do when they grew up a shadow would cross his little face as if in a dim, childish way he realized that those were things in which he was never to share.
The days flowed on in monotonous content.
