F. Scott Fitzgerald and Romantic Destiny

The Magical Realist Case for “Benjamin Button”

“…Fitzgerald would not have had any knowledge of Spengler when he wrote “Benjamin Button.” According to Lehan, he probably came into contact with the German author's concepts in France around the summer of 1924 when he was composing The Great Gatsby (137). The impact of Spengler on Fitzgerald is evidenced by the reverberation of his concepts in the latter's later work: Gatsby ; Tender Is the Night ; Philippe, Count of Darkness ; and The Last Tycoon , as demonstrated by Lehan.…”

“…Fitzgerald would not have had any knowledge of Spengler when he wrote “Benjamin Button.” According to Lehan, he probably came into contact with the German author's concepts in France around the summer of 1924 when he was composing The Great Gatsby (137). The impact of Spengler on Fitzgerald is evidenced by the reverberation of his concepts in the latter's later work: Gatsby ; Tender Is the Night ; Philippe, Count of Darkness ; and The Last Tycoon , as demonstrated by Lehan. Similarly, Kirk Curnutt identifies traces of Spengler in Philippe , illustrating the way that, in this uncompleted work, Fitzgerald “would have catalogued the heroic traits [he] believed necessary to redeem modernity from fascism” (102).…”

“…Fitzgerald's aesthetic goal of imagining a redemption for Western “modernity” shows that he believed it to be imperiled, a point which indicates that Spengler's concepts resonated with a view of American society Fitzgerald already held. In Lehan's words, “Spengler provided Fitzgerald with a convenient frame of historical reference, a frame that seemed to coincide with Fitzgerald's own sense of personal experience” (153). Both writers perceived that the West was headed towards degeneration, but Fitzgerald extended Spengler's theories, applying them to the United States, as Lehan affirms: “While Spengler has … had less to say about America than Europe in his discussion of western decline, Fitzgerald seems to have filled in the pieces for himself” (148).…”

“…In Lehan's words, “Spengler provided Fitzgerald with a convenient frame of historical reference, a frame that seemed to coincide with Fitzgerald's own sense of personal experience” (153). Both writers perceived that the West was headed towards degeneration, but Fitzgerald extended Spengler's theories, applying them to the United States, as Lehan affirms: “While Spengler has … had less to say about America than Europe in his discussion of western decline, Fitzgerald seems to have filled in the pieces for himself” (148). “Benjamin Button” substantiates Lehan's assertion.…”

2. The decision-making context

“…2) The BAMPS Algorithm: The BAMPS algorithm determines the Bayes labeling z, ... , ZM under the loss function It is clear from (20) and the definition of a(n -1, zn) and b(n, zn) that (24) The BAMPS algorithm, named by Lehan [14] Equation (25) is similar to the iterative procedure of Raviv [19] who shows how to make a decision on the nth unit using all the past measurements x 1, , x-n 1 and the current measurement xn. Equation (26) is basically (25) with indexing starting from the end rather than the beginning.…”