Summary:
Reviews Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis. Summarizes the story and examines the major theme of the pressures of conformity. Includes a description of the book and mentions Lewis' style and purpose.
In the business-centered city of Zenith, George F. Babbitt is, "to the eye, the perfect office-going executive": he is a successful and wealthy realtor, has a nice suburban house, and owns everything that is modern and expensive. Yet, he is unsatisfied with his life because his business, religion, friendships, and golf alike are all "incredibly mechanical." Every day, he reads the newspaper editorials and listens to his neighbors just to parrot their ideas and appear intelligent, as long as it sounds conservative.
Babbitt's only true friend, Paul Riesling, is the one person he can be honest with. Like most people in Zenith, Paul has sacrificed his personal dreams for commercial success, giving up the violin for a roofing business. Riesling is also troubled like Babbitt and he is unhappily married. Blaming his problems on his bitter wife, he shoots her in the shoulder and is put in prison. Babbitt now has no real friends and feels that he faces "a world which, without Paul, [is] meaningless."
While returning from an unsuccessful vacation meant to find happiness, Babbitt talks with Seneca Doane, a man with liberal views. Without anyone else telling him what to think, Babbitt begins to agree with Doane's liberal ideas.
Upon arriving back in Zenith, Babbitt begins openly expressing his newly found liberal ideas, meeting opposition. For showing his new beliefs, Babbitt is rejected and becomes a social outcast from his group of "friends," being ignored in both friendship and business.
Babbitt is pressured by many people to return to his old conservative and conforming self, but he refuses. In order to keep his liberal views, he must continue to be unrecognized and rejected, but can he? Does he have the strength to withstand the demands for conformity? If he is like the majority of people in Zenith, he will not.
Sinclair Lewis has the ability to capture the essence of Zenith businessmen with their words. His use of slang words such as "frinstance" and "zize" helps to portray the not-so-sophisticated personalities of the rich "Zenithites." With this thorough and accurate style of mimicry, there comes very long, boring, and essentially empty speeches by Babbitt and other people which drone on slowly.
The pressures of conformity on society in Babbitt occurred not only in the fictional city of Zenith, but in all America during the 1920s. Lewis exposed how ridiculous conformity made Babbitt and the other characters in the story appear and he greatly emphasized this fact to make it obvious. Zenith would have fit in with America in the 1920s, but it could also fit in America today as well.
Lewis, Sinclair. Babbitt. New York: New American Library, 1950.
This is the complete article, containing 435 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
