this story is the theme of absurdity and incongruity as well as immense guilt. Charlie made his life better for himself and then had his goals and dreams taken away from him by the failure to take his daughter back under his own wing. Charlie's past experiences caused him to fail in achieving Honoria's custody despite hard work and dedication to remaking himself to become a better person and a better father. He is burdened with guilt because of his past mistakes that caused him to lose his daughter, even though he made a valiant effort to rebuild his morale. Hopefulness and disappointment Throughout the story, Charlie builds an enormous amount of hope for the retrieval of his daughter. Charlie's euphoria continues to grow as he becomes more and more hopeful of this preferred outcome. At the end of the story, he is faced with the disappointment of losing this chance to rekindle the relationship between himself and his daughter. Basis in real life The story is based on a true incident regarding Fitzgerald, his daughter Scottie, his sister-in-law Rosalind and her husband Newman Smith (a banker based in Belgium, who was a colonel in the U.S. Army in World War II would be in charge of worldwide strategic deception for the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff), on whom Marion and Lincoln Peters are based. Rosalind and Newman had not been able financially to live as well as Scott and Zelda had lived during the 1920s, and they had always regarded Scott as an irresponsible drunkard whose obsession with high living was responsible for Zelda's mental problems. When Zelda suffered a breakdown and was committed to a sanitarium in Switzerland, Rosalind felt that Scott was unfit to raise their daughter and that Rosalind and Newman should adopt her. In popular culture "Babylon Revisited" was adapted for the 1954 film The Last Time I Saw Paris with the setting updated to post-WWII Paris and main character Charles turned into an aspiring novelist. In the television series Mad Men, the character Betty Draper is seen reading the story in the season two episode Three Sundays. See also Babylon Revisited and Other Stories References External links Text of "Babylon Revisited" at Project Gutenberg Australia "Babylon Revisited" Study Guide by Lina Goldberg Expostulation and Thesis by Thomas A. Larson "Babylon Revisited" in a nutshell at shmoop.com Short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald 1931 short