Hipsy's View: Benjamin Button

*WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!!!!!! If you have not read this story, I advice you not to read this blog, due to that it contains some spoilers. If you do not mind being told parts of the stories, then please read this review and comment.*

Today, I read a story where I first laughed, and by the end of it I cried. Some may think that strange to do, but this is the second book I have read from F. Scott Fitzgerald, and had the similar feeling towards the end of a story. For the first time, I have read The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and I pity the character Benjamin. In the beginning, the story seems like a comedy; it's funny to see how a child is born a fully grown, elderly man, and can speak as though he has been talking for sixty years. I could even imagine his bridle, old legs sticking out of a baby carriage. But as the story progresses, I feel sorry for poor Benjamin because instead of enjoying the things we should as we age, such as becoming a parent and being successful in business --and in Benjamin's case, war-- those things start to slip away. They don't slip away because of old age and the loss of memory, but because things like that do not matter to little boys. And instead of dying knowing he has loved ones among him, it became "all dark" and everything "faded out altogether from his mind." Now usually I cry when a character dies in a movie or a good story, but I felt sad for Benjamin. Life was unusual for him, like it is for everyone, but to go through it backwards I think would be horrible. It would be unfair to go through life in an unusual order and not know what you could have, and did accomplished when you were on this earth in the end.

I liked this story, but I feel sad to think of a character who had to live a life backwards and not join us in the things we all must -- or have already have -- experience in the beginning, in the middle, and near the end of our own stories.