# Roger Button — Short Fiction character guide

> Roger Button in Short Fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

**Role:** supporting

**Also known as:** Mr. Roger Button, Mr. Button, Button, the newborn Button, old Roger Button

**First appearance:** 0000-tarquin-of-cheapside

## Snapshot

Roger Button is a respectable Baltimore hardware wholesaler whose orderly life is upended by a son born old, bearded, and already speaking in complete sentences.

## Who they are

Roger Button wants nothing more than to be a normal father to a normal heir, but his newborn son arrives looking like a seventy-year-old man and calling him 'father' with grotesque courtesy. He chops the beard with hospital shears, dresses the infant in dotted socks and pink pants, and grimly takes him out in public anyway. As Benjamin ages backward and the two become companions who could pass for brothers, Roger's baffled propriety becomes the story's quiet measure of how little the world knows what to do with the strange.

## In the story

### [The Curious Case of Benjamin Button](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/chapters/the-curious-case-of-benjamin-button)

Benjamin's father, who is initially horrified by his son's appearance.

### [I](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/chapters/i)

The father, a wealthy Baltimore hardware merchant, who is horrified to discover his newborn son is a seventy-year-old man.

### [II](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/chapters/ii)

Mr. Button nervously buys clothes for his newborn son, struggles with the clerk, and forces his son to wear a fancy dress suit.

### [III](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/chapters/iii)

Persists in treating Benjamin as a normal baby, buying toys and insisting on childish behavior; struggles to maintain the illusion of normality; compromises on long trousers but demands Benjamin dye his hair and avoid spectacles.

### [IV](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/chapters/iv)

Benjamin's father sends him to Connecticut to take examinations for Yale.

### [V](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/chapters/v)

At fifty, takes Benjamin to social events and discusses business, unaware of his son's romantic distraction.

### [VI](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/chapters/vi)

Benjamin's father; publishes Benjamin's birth certificate in the Baltimore Blaze to counter rumors.

### [VII](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/chapters/vii)

Retires in 1895 after the family fortune doubles; eventually bestows adulation on Benjamin.

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/roger_button
- Book: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se
- All characters: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters