SOURCE: "When the Story Ends: 'Babylon Revisited'," in The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1982, pp. 269-77.

In the following essay, Baker analyzes images of freedom and imprisonment in "Babylon Revisited."

A kind of change came in my fate,
 My keepers grew compassionate,
 I know not what had made them so.
 They were inured to sights of woe.
 And so it was:—my broken chain
 With links unfastened did remain
 And it was liberty to stride
 Along my cell from side to side.

—Byron, "The Prisoner of Chillon"

Fitzgerald once called "Babylon Revisited" a magnificent short story (Letters). The adjective still holds. It is probably his best. Written in December, 1930, it was first published February 21, 1931, in the Saturday Evening Post, whose editors must have recognized its superior qualities, well above the norm of the stories from his pen...