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Babbitt\'s living room is decorated to be like every other living room in Floral Heights, and Babbitt\'s conversation with his wife is no more original or inspiring than the room in which it\'s held. Suddenly, though, he does something unexpected: he announces that he\'d like to make a long motor trip. But he hasn\'t worked up the courage to confess he\'d like to make the trip without his wife. His rebellion is still a private one.
Lewis takes as much time to show Babbitt going to sleep as he did to show Babbitt awakening. Babbitt in the bathtub is a sympathetic figure, plump, pink, content, childlike. But once he steps from the tub you\'re reminded of the limitations of this man and of his comfortable life. He\'s a pawn of larger organizations. The Elks, the Boosters, the Chamber of Commerce tell him what to think about his city. The Presbyterian Church tells him what to worship. The Republican party tells him whom to vote for, and advertisers tell him what to buy. Lewis is showing you two sides of Babbitt--the naive, goodhearted man and the unthinking conformist. Which part of his personality do you think will triumph by the book\'s end?
Lewis\'s chronicle of Babbitt\'s day began with a panoramic view of Zenith. Now you get another panoramic view as the narrative moves from Babbitt\'s home to other parts of the city. You see the rich: the smoothly elegant Horace Updike unsuccessfully trying to seduce Lucile McKelvey. You see the criminal: a cocaine runner murdering a prostitute in Healey Hanson\'s saloon. (You\'ll see that saloon in more detail later.) In a laboratory, two scientists investigate synthetic rubber. In another part of the city, union leaders discuss a strike. A dying Civil War veteran (a member of the G.A.R., the Grand Army of the Republic) reminds us of the backwoods-type town Zenith used to be; the humming, prisonlike Pullmore Tractor Factory shows the modern industrial center Zenith is today. Lewis gives us our first portrait of religion in Zenith, as the famous boxer-turned-evangelist Mike Monday (a thinly disguised version of Billy Sunday, an ex-baseball player who became a well-known evangelist in the 1920s) finishes a prayer meeting. The portrait isn\'t a very flattering one. Mike Monday is valued mainly as a way of averting labor unrest, and his sermon--another example of Lewis\'s gift of parody--is nothing but loud blather.
Next appear two men who share some of Lewis\'s cynicism toward Zenith: Seneca Doane, the radical lawyer, and Kurt Yavitch, a histologist whose study of cells has made Zenith a world-famous scientific center. \"I hate your city,\" Yavitch tells Doane; he hates it for its standardization. Although, as a radical, Doane might be expected to agree, he doesn\'t. Zenith is no more standardized than are the cities of England or France, Doane argues, and industrial standardization provides better goods for less money. What Doane condemns is Zenith\'s standardization of thought, the cutthroat competition, the business trickery of the so-called good family men who lead the city.
In the next scene, two of those devious men, politician Jake Offutt and Henry T. Thompson, Babbitt\'s father-in-law, plot a shady business deal in which Babbitt will play a key role. Offutt and Thompson make us understand that although Lewis is attacking--often fiercely--the modern Zenith, he doesn\'t want us to be nostalgic about the past. Babbitt\'s generation may regard Thompson as a symbol of old-fashioned integrity, but he\'s more crooked than they are.
Offutt and Thompson are worried about Seneca Doane. He alone seems to understand what they\'re up to and is willing to fight them. The rest of the city can\'t share Doane\'s outrage. It\'s asleep. And Babbitt, too, is asleep, ready to begin his blissful dream of the fairy child.
NOTE: ZENITH As he did in the first chapter, Lewis gives us a panoramic view of Zenith with all its strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, it\'s modern and economically vital; it\'s helping pull America into the prosperous twentieth century. On the other hand, it has deep class divisions; the gap between the wealthy Lucile McKelvey and the out-of-work man who kills himself is enormous. Zenith has religion, but it\'s the loud, empty religion of Mike Monday. It has democracy, but it\'s a democracy manipulated by Jake Offutt. It is, as Seneca Doane says, a place of cutthroat competition and standardization of thought. In short, it\'s fascinating, powerful, and deeply flawed.
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