English 015 - Americans Abroad
Dissipation
Dissipation
Category: 05B: Babylon Revisited | Karen Tang
Paris is full of illusions. In Fitzgerald’s Babylon Revisited, Charlie wants to see the “blue hour spread over the magnificent façade, and imagine that the cab horns, playing endlessly the first few bars of Le Plus que Lent, were the trumpets of the Second Empire” (p.386). Paris is veiled with colorful images and enthusiastic sounds: “fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs, (BR p.386)” “the red and green stop-and-go traffic-signal, and the crowd going by, and the horse-cabs clipety-clopping along at the edge of the solid taxi traffic, and the poules going by…(SAR p.22)” Paris is full of people seeking for illusions. “In the little hours of the night every move from place to place was an enormous human jump, an increase of paying for the privilege of slower and slower motion. (BR p.389)” In Babylon Revisited, the Americans went from place to place to spend money and kill time; in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the Americans also went from bar to bar. “Come on and we’ll get a drink in the pub next door and send for one. (SAR p.31)” There are so many pubs, so many drinks, and so much for night lives. The Americans are numbed by alcohol; they fall into the whirlpool of colorful illusions. Some people, like Charlie, eventually wake up, and others, like Lorraine Quarrles, try to still remain in the past.
Posted by ktang on October 23, 2003 at 02:29 PM