“As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home.”

The opening sentence establishes the historical and social setting of the story. The Buttons have decided not to do “the proper thing” but instead to have their baby in a hospital. The narrator hints that “this anachronism” may or may not have had something to do with Benjamin’s curious condition. The film adaptation opens with its own quasi-explanatory device: a clock that runs backward in memory of fallen First World War soldiers—like the clockmaker’s son—who died before their time.

“The Roger Buttons held an enviable position, both social and financial, in ante-bellum Baltimore. They were related to the This Family and the That Family, which, as every southerner knew, entitled them to membership in that enormous peerage which largely populated the Confederacy.”

Positioning in social class is a major theme of the story and drives the concerns Roger Button has about his son. Fitzgerald indicates a satiric view of the aristocracy with his flippant reference to “the This Family and the That Family.” The “social and financial” benefits of the Confederacy are generated by a heinous slave trade, briefly glimpsed in the story, defended to the death just a few years later in the Civil War, the first of three major wars shaping Benjamin’s life story.

“The notion of dressing his son in men’s clothes was repugnant to him. If, say, he could only find a very large boy’s suit, he might cut off that long and awful beard, dye the white hair brown, and thus manage to conceal the worst and to retain something of his own self-respect—not to mention his position in Baltimore society.”

Roger’s all-consuming concern for social position is repeatedly expressed in an obsession with proper clothing. How Benjamin appears in public will have major implications for Roger’s “self-respect,” which is inextricably linked to “his position in Baltimore society.