lakjd
...s sincerely trying to re-invent himself, and we think he deserves a chance. Significantly, however, the world Charlie depicts when he's sober is a much more dull, colorless, lifeless place than the world he recalls from his drinking days. We see this in contrasting Charlie with either his still-drinking friends or with his daughter Honoria, both of whom still see the world as wonderful and full of possibilities. Charlie, on the other hand, realizes that "all the catering to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale, and he suddenly realized the meaning of the word 'dissipate' -- to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something. 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. He remembered thousand-franc notes given to an orchestra for playing a single number, hundred-franc notes tossed to a doorman for calling a cab." Nonetheless, this is a world his sister-in-law Marion would never be able to understand. Marion emphatically has no time for Charlie, and we can see that her animosity stems from the time when he played fast and loose with life in general, and with the heart of her sister Helen in particular. She refers to an incident when Charlie locked Helen out of the house in the snow, apparently a relatively short time before Helen’s death. Although there is no real medical connection between the snow incident and Helen’s heart attack, Marion still connects the two events in her mind because they occurred about the same time, and unjustifiably holds Charlie responsible for the death of his wife. Because Marion sees her dead sister as a martyr, she sees Charlie as the villain; the possibility that Helen could have played an active part in the breakup of their marriage -- or that it just might not be any of Marion's business -- would never cross Marion's mind. If the gray, lifeless aspect of Paris is represented by Marion, its decadent joie de vivre is represented by Charlie’s friends Lorraine and Duncan, whom Fitzgerald describes as part "of a crowd who had helped them make months into days in the lavish times of three years ago." They are still living the giddy drunken lifestyle Charlie is trying to rise above, and we can look at them and see clearly what Charlie must have been. As Fitzgerald writes, "They were gay, they were hilarious, they were roaring with laughter," and they see nothing wrong with barging into Marion's house and inviting Charlie to dinner, at what is certainly the most inopportune time possible. Fitzgerald observes that Lorraine and Duncan like Charlie "because he was functioning, because he was serious; they wanted to see him, because he was stronger than they were now, because they wanted to draw a cer...