# The Elderly Gentleman — Back to Methuselah character guide

> The Elderly Gentleman in Back to Methuselah by George Bernard Shaw.

**Role:** major

**Also known as:** The Elderly Gentleman Good Lord, The Elderly Gentleman Gracious Powers, The Elderly Gentleman Illuminated, The Elderly Gentleman Exhausted, The Elderly Gentleman Puzzled, The Elderly Gentleman Scrambling

**First appearance:** 0057-part-iv-tragedy-of-an-elderly-gentleman

## Snapshot

A distinguished visitor from the short-lived past who arrives in the long-lived future expecting deference and finds his entire vocabulary obsolete.

## Who they are

He comes to the future world as an emissary of standing, accustomed to being listened to, and is promptly assigned a nurse and forbidden to speak with fully adult natives lest he die of discouragement. His outrage is genuine and increasingly ridiculous: he insists on his rank, his health, his decency, while the words themselves have quietly stopped meaning anything. His collapse into song and antics is the play's sharpest comedy and its sharpest argument, since his inability to converse with a woman centuries his senior exposes how little of his authority was ever his own.

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/the_elderly_gentleman
- Book: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se
- All characters: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters