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Birth
Mr. Button has some trouble welcoming his son into the world: "Where in god's name did you come from? Who are you?" (63) -
Babyhood
Mr. Button decides that “Benjamin was a baby, and a baby he shall remain” (66). -
Kindergarten
Benjamin is sent to kindergarten where he was “initiated into the art of pasting green pare on orange paper, of weaving colored maps and manufacturing eternal cardboard necklaces” (68). -
Growing Up
Benjamin, at the age of twelve, goes to his father and says, “I am grown. I want to put on long trousers” (68). -
College
Benjamin’s father sends him to Yale College where he is kicked out because they do not think he is a freshman: “The idea! A man of your age trying to enter here as a freshman. Eighteen years old are you? Well, I’ll give you eighteen minutes to get out of town” (70). -
Job
Benjamin signalizes his twentieth birthday by “going to work with his father in Roger Button and Co., Wholesale Hardware” (71). -
Meeting Hilegarde
Benjamin meets a woman named Hildegarde who eventually he ends up marrying: “But when his own time came, and he drifted with her out upon the changing floor to the music of the latest waltz from Paris, his jealousies and anxieties melted from him like a mantle of snow” (72). -
Growing Away
Benjamin’s wife Hildegarde ceased to attract him: “Her honey-colored hair became an unexciting brown, the blue enamel of her eye had assumed the aspect of cheap crockery—moreover, and most of all, she had become to settled in her ways, too placid, too ccontent, too anemic in her actions, and too sober in her taste. -
War
Benjamin was so discontent with his wife that at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War he joined the army and "with his business influence he obtained a commission as captain, and proved so adaptable to the work that he was made a major and finally a lieutenant-colonel just in time to participate in the celebrated charge up San Juan Hill” (75-76). -
College Again
Benjamin enters Harvard and takes revenge on Yale: “He played so brilliantly, with so much dash and with such cold, remorseful anger that he scored seven toughdowns and fourteen field goals for Harvard, and caused one entire eleven of Yale men to be carried singly from the field, unconscious” (78). -
War Again
Benjamin is invited to reenter the army with a higher rank but when he arrives at the camp he is sent away: “His son Roscoe materialized from Baltimore, hot and cross from a hasty trip, and escorted the weeping general, sans uniform, back to his home. -
Kindergarten Again
Benjamin goes back to kindergarten and finds “that playing with little strips of colored paper, making mats and chains and curious and beautiful designs, was the most fascinating game in the world” (82). -
Gone
Benjamin forgets: “Then it was all dark, and the white crib and the dim faces that moved above him, and the warm sweet aroma of milk, faded out altogether from his mind” (83).