Writers of the period reacted strongly to the idea of time as a flux through which people
move and exist. In this thesis I will investigate Bergson’s influence on F. Scott Fitzgerald
through a reading of his short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (1922), as well as a
Bergsonian analysis of David Fincher’s adaptation of the text into his 2008 film The Curious
Case of Benjamin Button. Two of Bergson’s basic concepts concerning the nature of time will
illuminate different modernist texts as well as Fitzgerald’s short story and Fincher’s film: the
idea of simultaneity, different planes of consciousness co-existing, and the idea of durée, the
time or experience of pure feeling outside of chronological order. Both of these concepts will
illuminate that which may be called “timeless:” the realm where a linear progression of isolated
presents is overthrown, and memory, experience, and being form a heterogeneous whole.