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Winter dreams and the great gatsby literary comparison essay conclusion
Winter dreams and the great gatsby literary comparison essay conclusion
Symbolism as a literary tool essay
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Winter Dreams, a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, was written in September 1922 and published on December of the same year. During this period, Fitzgerald was widely known for his short stories. In 1925, Fitzgerald wrote his greatest success and masterpiece The Great Gatsby, which is still known to be one of the most classic pieces of American Fiction. There are many parallels between the two works, which leads readers to think that the Winter Dreams acted like a microcosm to The Great Gatsby. In many cases, the story in Winter Dreams seems to be a precursor to the larger and more cinematic story of Jay Gatsby. There are many similarities between the protagonists of the two works: both come from families from the Midwest, both long to achieve …show more content…
a greater social status, and both fail in that attempt. Through the use of conflict, irony, and symbolism in Winter Dreams, F. Scott Fitzgerald exemplified the themes of the social inequality, American Dream, and class present in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s use of the theme of social inequality is contained mostly in the earlier parts of the story to differentiate the social statuses of Dexter and Judy. Dexter is a driven and ambitious young boy from a middle-class background, who works at a golf course as a caddie more for the opportunity to get a glimpse of the lives of the rich than for the money. Dexter’s desire to become wealthy is even more accentuated when he sees Judy at the same golf course he works for. Dexter sees Judy’s wealth, status, and her beauty, which makes him feel awful that he works as a caddie. Dexter feels that he would never attract Judy as a caddie and immediately quits his job and begins his quest to become wealthy. A major conflict of Winter Dreams is Dexter’s desire to join the ranks of the rich because the social inequality would never allow him to court a girl like Judy. This conflict fuels Dexter’s desire and gives him the motivation to be successful. Similarly, in The Great Gatsby, social inequality presides as one of the main conflicts for Jay Gatsby in his mission to achieve his desired woman. Through this conflict, we can see that Winter Dreams was an early sketch of The Great Gatsby. Another theme that transcends in both Winter Dreams and The Great Gatsby is the American Dream.
Dexter fantasizes his life and falls victim to his adolescent dreams that he is never able to fulfill. In his quest to achieve Judy, Dexter never sees more than the outside beauty of Judy, which haunts him for the rest of his life. Judy simply goes towards the direction of wealth. She confesses that she was breaking off relation with another man just because he was not able to support her financially. Dexter is in love with the idea of having Judy as a wife because of her beauty and her social class, which blinds him from the reality of who Judy is. For Dexter, the American Dream is not just about wealth; it is also about acquiring social status to have the ability to marry a woman who is rich. We see the dark side of the American Dream, where even though the main character achieves success, glory, and wealth, he still cannot find true happiness. This is the irony about the American Dream. One would expect that once he or she achieves wealth and success, they would live happily, but for the main characters in the two works, it brings more pain and suffering. Through the use of irony in Winter Dreams, Fitzgerald exposes the shallowness that comes from the pursuit of American Dream. The pursuit of the American Dream makes Dexter blind and prevents him from achieving true happiness. Similarly, Jay Gatsby also deals with identical problems where he is not able to find happiness because of his desire to gain social status and the woman of his dreams proving another area, where Winter Dreams acts as a microcosm of The Great
Gatsby. As there are many symbols in The Great Gatsby, Winter Dreams also has a good amount of similar symbols. The Golf club where Dexter used to work is a symbol of wealth, where only rich people play for luxury. The golf club is also the place where Dexter first sees Judy and falls in love with the idea of Judy. Dexter associates his money with love as a tool to get Judy Jones to fall in love with him back. The problem that arises from him chasing after money is that it replaces his ability to find true love in his life. Another symbolic detail that is associated with the Dexter’s love is the golf balls. The symbol of identical golf balls represents the upper-class society as a bland and shallow group of people and by Dexter playing in the same course where he used to caddy tells us that he sacrificed his identity in an effort to gain class and find his version of love. The boat in Sherry Island Golf Club is also symbol of luxury and serves as an escape from reality for Judy Jones as she surfs behind escaping the men trying to idolize her as their perfect woman. The boat becomes a safe haven for Judy from the societal pressure of being a young and beautiful woman. Likewise, in The Great Gatsby, the Rolls Royce cars represented luxury and just like how the golf club represented wealth, living in the Hamptons also showed wealth. In this short story Winter Dreams, Fitzgerald uses the elements of conflict, irony, and symbolism to portray the themes of social inequality, American Dream and class. By using those elements, the story in Winter Dreams remains entertaining and relevant for readers today. Dexter’s success in getting wealthy demonstrates both the positives and the negatives of a sudden rise in wealth. In a positive way, wealth brings a luxurious life. However, wealth also brings bad human relationships and a loss of true happiness.
In ‘Winter Dreams’, the ending is unexpected. Throughout the story, we are under the impression that this is the story of Dexter Green's love for Judy Jones. But at the end of the story, once Dexter finds out that Judy has lost her charms and settled into a bad marriage, we begin to wonder if this story is about something else entirely. Dexter does not weep for Judy. He weeps for himself, for the young man he once was and for the illusions he once held.
F. Scott Fitzgerald is known as a great author for his several works that do a great job at capturing the 1920s and allowing readers to get a look inside what the 20s would actually be like. The 1920s was a booming time period, people were getting richer and businesses were growing larger and larger with each year. This was a decade during the prohibition and even so, alcohol and partying was everywhere. Fitzgerald provides a very interesting look into the 1920s through both his short story, “Winter Dreams,” and in his novel The Great Gatsby. The main character in “Winter Dreams,” Dexter Green, is an upper middle class man who falls in love with an old money girl and spends his life
Dreams prove as a powerful, motivating force, propelling an individual forward into real achievements in life. Conversely, dreams can transpire as blatantly artificial. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” depicts the story of Dexter Green, a young man who dreams of achievements and works hard in a real, non-illusionary world to win them. His work in this plain, unromantic world brings him ever closer to the dream world he so desperately wants, while at the same time the dreams show themselves as decaying or empty. Unfortunately, this does not cure him of dreaming and does not push him to abandon his dreams in favor of a healthier attitude. When Dexter embodies all of his dreams in the beautiful Judy Jones, her fickle attitude and the inevitability of her aging destroys Dexter’s dream world and dries up the source of his achievements. The author, using paradoxes, shows Judy Jones differently through Dexter’s eyes, and reinforces the theme of illusion versus reality.
Scott Fitzgerald showcases the American Dream and how success can lead to fortune, but not all people meet all their goals and sometimes “the dream” is just an illusion that leads to misfortune. “Of course, Dexter’s renunciation of the world that he sees Judy dominating leads to success in business and his conquest of the adult world, since he forgoes pleasure to concentrate on getting ahead. But even at the beginning of that conquest, the victory turns sour” (Fahey 147). Dexter the moment he saw Judy he became determined to become wealthy and marry the prettiest girl around, only then he would have reached the American Dream. “Because his winter dreams happened to be concerned at first with musings on the rich” (Fitzgerald). Dexter was obsessed with become part of the rich, he dreamed of being a golf champion, he went to a more prestige college even if it meant more debt, he bought a laundry company, and he tried to win the girl. When Dexter was a caddy he desperately wanted to be successful and wealthy; he wanted to feel the happiness it would bring to his life. Years later when Dexter beat T.A. Hedrick in golf it brought him little joy to his everyday life. Dexter was forced to realize while living in the middle class that money could not buy his happiness no matter how hard he strived in business. By the end of the story Dexter realized the American Dream was just an illusion and could never fully be
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is the masterpiece of American literature and the product of three years of the thorough work. It was unfairly undervalued in the first part of the 20th Century and was banned in 1987. Fitzgerald wrote the short story Winter Dreams, as he described it as “a sort of draft of the Gatsby idea” (Hook 51). He finished the novel at the end of August 1924 and sent the manuscript to the Perkins, his editor, with the letter where he wrote: “I am sending you my third novel: The Great Gatsby (I think that at last I’ve done something really my own) but how good “my own “is reminds to be seen” (Hook 62).
The short story of “Winter Dreams” was written around the same time that Fitzgerald was developing ideas for a story to turn into a novel. While The Great Gatsby wasn’t published until 1925, “Winter Dreams” débuted in 1922 and the similarities between the novel and short story were done on purpose. “Winter Dreams” became a short draft which Fitzgerald paralleled The Great Gatsby after, but also differentiated the two in specific ways (“Winter Dreams” 217). The main characters are both men, Jay Gatsby and Dexter Green, who desire for the American dream, not necessarily for themselves, but in order to lure back the women they idealize. In The Great Gatsby and “Winter Dreams” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s constant theme is shown through the characters of Jay Gatsby and Dexter Green, both similar in the way they pursue the American dream of wealth and social status in order to try and win back the women they love, but also different in specific ways.
Both of the protagonist, are men from poor backgrounds. Both of them wish to be wealthy and have these dream women. Both of them wish to make it well in the east. However while they are alike in many ways, they are also very different. One way that they differ is that while Gatsby can't seem to recognize what is a dream or reality. Dexter is smarter than Gatsby in this way. Dexter can see the difference between dreams and reality. While Gatsby can't see it with Daisy, Dexter can see the difference with Judy.
In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nick’s unreliability as a narrator is blatantly evident, as his view of Gatsby’s actions seems to arbitrarily shift between disapproval and approval. Nick is an unreliable and hypocritical narrator who disputes his own background information and subjectively depicts Gatsby as a benevolent and charismatic host while ignoring his flaws and immorality from illegal activities. He refuses to seriously contemplate Gatsby’s negative attributes because of their strong mutual friendship and he is blinded by an unrealized faith in Gatsby. Furthermore, his multitude of discrepancies damage his ethos appeal and contribute to his lack of dependability.
The American Dream: the traditional social ideals of the US, such as equality, democracy, and material prosperity. Dexter represents this very well in the story Winter Dreams because it shows how he starts from the bottom and eventually works his way to the top. This is kind of an inspiring story because it starts off by having him be the best and most successful golf caddy that this golf course has ever had. All of the people that had him as a caddy were against him going other places and doing something with his life. Dexter made his own decisions and went where he wanted to go and he wanted more out of his like than being a golf caddy his whole life. In the text Winter Dreams written by Scott Fitzgerald Dexter is a worthy tribute to the American Dream he showed us that you can start from the bottom and have a very successful career ahead of you, Dexter showed us that if you work hard enough you can end up at the top, but you have to be willing to do the work, and everyone has an equal opportunity to be successful it is just the people who are willing to make sacrifices and want to be successful in life.
The American Dream is not something easily achieved, and according to Fitzgerald it is literally unattainable. There is always some obstacle or barrier in the way of success. Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby is not a very satisfied man; he seems to have a sense of ennui when it comes to his marriage and his life. So he lives the life he really wants part time with his mistress, Myrtle Wilson. However, this semi-fulfillment of his dreams is stopped, and what stops it is the fact that Myrtle is married, and her husband, George, has “discovered that Myrtle [has] some sort of life apart from him in another world” (The Great Gatsby 130). Tom is reaching for his own idea of success with Myrtle, but he cannot reach it due to her being married. What keeps one from attaining their dreams is not necessarily something as physical as a marriage; it can be someone’s attitude, like that of Judy Jones in Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams”. The young protagonist in this story, Dexter Green, is in love with the flighty flirt Judy Jones. His dream is to be with her; unfortunately, “She [is] entertained only by the gratification of her own ...
The plot of “Winter Dreams” is similar to a fairy tale. The story begins with a middle class young boy dreaming of fame and fortune. Dexter always will want more in life than he already does. He worked as a caddy and dreamed of one day golfing with these rich men. He first saw Judy Jones as a young boy. Like a fairytale, there’s “love at first sight”. Any fairytale would have ended this story with Dexter and Judy falling in love and spending the rest of their
Book Analysis F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of "The Great Gatsby," reveals many principles about today's society and the "American dream. " One of the biggest fears in today's world is the fear of not fitting into society. People of all age groups and backgrounds share this fear. Many individuals believe that to receive somebody's affection, they must assimilate into that person's society. In the story, Jay Gatsby pursues the American dream and his passion for being happy only to come to a tragedy and total loss.
In “Winter Dreams”, love is one of the main focuses in the story. Judy is a rich, selfish girl. Dexter is the poor man lusting for wealth and for the idea of a perfect women.
One’s parents owned the second best grocery store, and the other was a poor boy whose parents had no money. But these two have a similarity that makes the story better to understand who they are. For “The Great Gatsby” it seems to us that F. Scott Fitzgerald loves winding sentences that begin with one idea, person, or location and end up somewhere else entirely, and for “Winter Dreams” there is a strong sense of time passing. There is a similar tone in these two stories; a great example, in this story “Winter Dreams” author F. Scott Fitzgerald mentions the following quote, “During dinner [Judy] slipped into a moody depression which gave Dexter a feeling of uneasiness.
The found poem is set at the time of Daisy's and Gatsby's reencounter. The poem was intentionally separated into three stanzas in order to highlight the poem's shift. The first stanza seems like the poem will tell the story of past lovers who reunite after many years in order to relive their relationship. Essentially, the first few lines of the poem, "As if the past were lurking in her face...Like a deep memory beginning over again", parallels to how Gatsby perceives his re encounter with Daisy while they are still apart. However, poem's optimistic view of Gatsby's dream takes a sharp turn with the last line "In the eternal blindness of his illusion", it foreshadows that the possibility of recovering Gatsby’s romantic relationship with Daisy is