"Cliff Notes - Babbitt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

Adrift, Babbitt thinks of having an affair himself. He's attracted to an elegant client, Mrs. Tanis Judique, but instead turns his attentions to a teenaged manicurist--unsuccessfully. He goes to Maine, hoping to find the happiness he found there the year before, but this time sees only the same greed and conformity he sees in Zenith. On the train home, Babbitt bumps into Seneca Doane. This much-hated man surprises Babbitt by seeming intelligent, rational, and humane. Babbitt begins to express sympathy with Doane's liberal views, though without really understanding them.

His new beliefs are soon tested when Zenith is hit with labor strife. While Babbitt's conservative friends demand the strike be halted, Babbitt sides with the workers. Now Babbitt begins to see firsthand the price of any kind of nonconformity in Zenith: his friends grow deeply suspicious of him.

The strike is crushed. Babbitt, still looking for something or someone to give meaning to his life, begins to visit Tanis Judique. Tanis is part of a wild set who call themselves "The Bunch," and when Babbitt is seen with them, his old friends grow more hostile. Then Babbitt commits another "crime": he refuses Vergil Gunch's invitation to join the Good Citizens' League, a group dedicated to stifling opinions it considers too liberal.

Mrs. Babbitt, confused and unhappy about her husband, seeks comfort in the half-baked philosophy of the American New Thought League. Babbitt feels trapped; even after he ends his affair with Tanis, pressure from Gunch and his other conservative friends increases. Join the Good Citizens' League, they demand, and when he again refuses they make him an outcast in his own city, whispering, spying, denying Babbitt both friendship and business.

One night Mrs. Babbitt complains of a pain in her side: appendicitis. The illness terrifies her and Babbitt as well. As they rush to the hospital, he realizes he's too weak to continue his rebellion. Zenith has licked him. He vows loyalty to all the false values he briefly fought: to business, to success, to Zenith.

Mrs. Babbitt recovers. At the end of the book, Babbitt is almost the same man he was at its start--except that now he has no illusions about his dishonest, empty life. When his son Ted shocks the family by eloping, and asks permission to quit college and become a mechanic, Babbitt takes him aside and gives his approval. Perhaps the younger generation can make up for Babbitt's failure--if, unlike Babbitt, Ted can remain unafraid of his family, unafraid of Zenith, unafraid of himself. Then disillusioned father and still-hopeful son march in to greet their family.


Babbitt is a satiric look both at one man and at an entire society. As such, it's crowded with characters. Some of them, notably George Babbitt, are well developed, possessing the mixture of good and bad qualities that human beings possess. But many others are flat and simple--not flesh-and-blood people so much as representatives of the various social classes and occupations that Lewis wants to satirize.


^^^^^^^^^^BABBITT: GEORGE F. BABBITT

George F. Babbitt, the forty-six-year-old realtor who gives the novel its title, is a figure so vivid he's come to represent the typical prosperous, middle-aged American businessman of the 1920s--conservative, uncultured, smug, conforming, and loud.

Babbitt has dozens of faults, and Lewis the satirist wants you to laugh at every one of them. Babbitt's a booster, loudly promoting his city even when he doesn't understand what he's promoting. He takes pride in being modern, but he knows nothing of the science and engineering he salutes. He praises business ethics, but he isn't above making shady deals with the Zenith Street Traction Company; he talks about leading a moral life but goes to a brothel and indulges in an adulterous affair. Music and art are threatening mysteries, great literature is a letter promoting cemetery plots, and education and religion are merely means of getting ahead in real estate.

And yet Lewis doesn't want us merely to sneer at Babbitt. In fact, as he wrote to a friend, he liked Babbitt--and he wants you to like Babbitt (at least a little) too. At his best, Babbitt is a sympathetic character. He may not understand his children, but he loves them. And his friendship with Paul Riesling is a genuine one.

Most important of all, Babbitt is able to see--though dimly--that his life has serious flaws and that he could be a better man than he is. Much of the book is devoted to showing Babbitt trying to become that man. He flees with Paul Riesling to the woods of Maine, which symbolize for him a masculine world, free and brave. He supports Seneca Doane's political crusade. Unfortunately, he isn't intelligent enough to choose really effective ways of rebelling. (When his attempt at politics fails, he enters into a rather foolish affair with the sophisticated Tanis Judique.) Nor is he strong enough to make his rebellion last.

Babbitt is a comic figure, and Lewis with his gift of parody will have you laughing at each of his absurd business letters, each of his boneheaded speeches. But at the end of the book Babbitt emerges as a pathetic figure as well. He's in the terrible bind of knowing that he needs to change but isn't courageous enough. Is he a more or less hapless victim of the Zenith mentality and morality? Or is he really responsible for his own plight, a man suffering only because he's now forced to follow the standards he demanded of everyone else? That's for you to decide. All Babbitt can hope for as his story ends is that the next generation, represented by his son, Ted, will somehow manage to lead a better life.

^^^^^^^^^^BABBITT: MYRA BABBITT

Plump, matronly Myra Babbitt has been married to George Babbitt for twenty-three years. She is no more a traditional heroine than her husband is a traditional hero. No better educated than Babbitt, she's both a victim of and a willing participant in Zenith's demands for conformity. Her main worries seem to revolve around social status. She wants to give successful dinner parties; she longs to be invited to the home of the wealthy Charles McKelveys.

The Babbitt marriage is a good one by Zenith standards, but as Lewis paints it, it's completely devoid of passion or romance. Babbitt feels trapped by his wife's dullness and turns first to dreaming of the fairy girl of his youth and then to pursuing Mrs. Tanis Judique.

Yet Mrs. Babbitt isn't an unsympathetic character. She is kind. And she deserves credit for having spent twenty years listening to Babbitt's irritable complaints. She can't understand his desire to rebel, but she too sees dimly that her life might have been better.

At the end of the book Mrs. Babbitt suffers an attack of appendicitis that brings the couple together. You may still be having mixed feelings about her. On the one hand, she's one of the forces making Babbitt abandon his rebellion and return to safe, conformist Zenith life. On the other hand, she's been a victim of that conformist life as well. When in the ambulance she suggests it might be better if she did die because no one loves her, you may see, as Babbitt sees, that she hasn't had an easy time of it in Zenith either.

^^^^^^^^^^BABBITT: THEODORE ROOSEVELT BABBITT

Like some seventeen-year-olds, Babbitt's son, Ted, is caught up in a rebellion against his father. Babbitt wants Ted to go to college and then on to law school to have the legal career he was denied. Ted would rather be a mechanic. Yet despite these warring goals, father and son are more alike than different. Both are one hundred percent products of Zenith, mistrusting education, valuing material success above all else, more than willing to conform to Zenith's standards. Ted's high school party may seem wild to Babbitt, but it's exactly like every other high school party in the city.

Yet, like Babbitt, Ted has his good side. He does love his father. Away from home--as on their trip to Chicago--they act more like two friends than like father and son. When, at the end of the novel, Ted rebels by eloping with Eunice Littlefield and asking family permission to quit college, Babbitt gives his approval. He hopes that Ted will be strong enough to avoid the mistakes Babbitt made--that he won't be afraid of family, of Zenith, of himself.

From what you've seen of Ted and of Zenith, do you think Babbitt's hopes are justified? Will Ted be able to maintain his honest independence? Or is he destined to become as much a victim of conformity as his father?

^^^^^^^^^^BABBITT: VERONA BABBITT

Babbitt's twenty-two-year-old daughter considers herself superior to everyone around her. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College, she reads "genuine literature" (books by Joseph Conrad and H. L. Mencken), thinks of herself as an intellectual, and has vague plans to do social work.