ФІЗІОЛОГІЧНІ АБЕРАЦІЇ В ОПОВІДАННІ Ф.С. ФІЦДЖЕРАЛЬДА «ЗАГАДКОВА ІСТОРІЯ БЕНДЖАМІНА БАТТОНА»

The article focuses on the features of narrative designing the grotesquely
inverted childhood in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F.S. Fitzgerald.
The research is conducted with the use of narratological method, which involves
communicative understanding of the nature of literature, and the method of
receptive aesthetics, which enables the analysis of artistic texts in the context
of the interdependence of writing and reception, focusing on the figure of the
a reader as an active participant of literary interpretation. The scientific novelty of
the research consists in the fact that the article is the first attempt to study one

of the most striking literary experiments of F.S. Fitzgerald through the prism of
the history of medicine in the United States, medical deontology and grotesque
rethinking of the physiological course of human life as a symbolic embodiment
of the socio-cultural norm. The article distinguishes the grotesque aberrations
of Benjamin Button’s childhood at different levels of the literary text: at the
level of the symbol, the image and the motive. The narrative mechanisms of the
author’s intentions have been considered: to rethink, challenge and undermine
the authority of the established norms and social perceptions of the norm. It
has been noted that radical distortion of the physiological norm in The Curious
Case of Benjamin Button provides the maximum aggravation of the conflict
between the traditional world order of the 19th century and the dynamism of the
Roaring Twenties, predicting the birth of a new outlook that seeks to overcome
the entrenched canons and go beyond the usual.