“Babylon Revisited” is a short story set in Paris that is very much like an American story. It is a story about memories of the past, transformation, and wealth. Charlie Wales who is the protagonist of the story is a thirty-five-year old man who had spent all of his money in Paris in the mid 1920s when he was an alcoholic during the collapse of the stock market in 1929 who eventually gains his sobriety and moves to Prague. Throughout the story you see how ashamed Charlie is of his past and you also see his love for his daughter, Honoria, and his longing for his wife Helen, where he may be partially responsible for the cause of her death.
The main thing that you see Charlie suffer with is the past. Somehow its almost as though he lives his life…show more content… The main way we see this is through his relationship with his daughter. Fitzgerald first of all shows us the different types of love, when it is a love between fathers and daughters and a love between lovers. Fitzgerald shows us that the love fathers and daughters feel for each other is pure and the love between lovers are usually complicated by mistrust or dislike no matter how passionate the love is. We see this when Charlie looks back at his own marriage. Both he and Helen loved each other very much but most of the time they fought, tormented, and even abused each other. One prime example of this is the time Charlie and Helen fought and she went and kissed another man and Charlie got home before her so he locked her out of their apartment and she was stuck outside in a snowstorm. But the love we see between Charlie and his daughter is completely different when she says to him, “…but I love you better than anybody. And you love me better than anybody, don’t you, now that mummy’s dead?” (288) As much as Charlie may have failed as a father and as a husband due to his alcoholism, Honoria still loves him no matter what even though her mom died and the people who are raising her feel as though it is her father’s fault. None of that effected her love that she has for him because at the end of the day it is still her
