Charlie's past cannot escape him all throughout the story. No matter the location in Paris, or who he meets, his past follows him. Whether he is walking around or visiting the in-laws, he cannot escape it. for it was the last last last day rthat christmas would return for it was all over now but the crying there would be no more trhanksgiving and no more christmas its al over the snow began to fall and the wind was howling "Babylon Revisited" is the story of a Charlie Wales, a former drunken party-goer who returns to Paris, the site of his former 1920s debauchery, shortly after the stock market crash of 1929. Charlie sees his world with new (sober) eyes and is both shocked and appalled by the extravagance that characterized his former life. The story is rooted in the financial crisis of its times. Fitzgerald wrote the piece in December of 1930, when the good times of the Jazz Age (also called the "Roaring Twenties") had come to an end and America was headed into the Great Depression. Charlie's horror with his own former waste and self-destruction is Fitzgerald's condemnation of a society who drank away the '20s.
"Babylon Revisited" is also a criticism of Fitzgerald's own participation in the party that lasted a decade. (Fitzgerald's fast-lane lifestyle epitomized his generation of Jazz Age party-goers.) He wrote in a letter to his editor that he "announced the birth of [his] young illusions in This Side of Paradise, but pretty much the death of them in […] stories like
