F. Scott Fitzgerald writes about his character’s memories of their past to be a source of pain within their lives in Babylon Revisited and Winter Dreams. Within Babylon Revisited, Charlie Wales previously was an alcoholic, and he gives away custody of his nine-year-old daughter to attend rehab. He then attempts to regain custody by traveling to Paris, but two things deter him in this mission of his. Winter Dreams displays Dexter Green spending nearly his entire life trying to be his best for his version of the perfect woman, Judy Jones, and he then is told later in life that she has grown unattractive. The memories of Judy and the more recent description that he receives both cause Dexter to become less idealistic and to regret his past. Babylon
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Dexter meets Judy as he works as a caddy, and he immediately quit to pursue being the type of man that Judy would one day marry. After many years, he meets her again by chance, and they begin a relationship. Although Judy has many other relationships with other men, Dexter decides to deal with it out of pure infatuation with her, and Judy asks him to marry her despite the problematic relationship. They enter this engagement only for it to fail after a month, and Dexter ends up joining the army instead of suffering in sadness. After many years, Dexter hears words of Judy for the first time that cause him to look back on his past, “He had thought that having nothing else to lose he was invulnerable at last—but he knew that he had just lost something more, as surely as if he had married Judy Jones and seen her fade away before his eyes. The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him,” the narrator states (2201). This newly discovered diminishment of Judy’s beauty brings an unimaginable pain to Dexter, and he begins to cry for the loss of his chance of ever fulfilling his dreams. This is the moment in which Dexter realizes that whether he married Judy or not, he would have ended up not accomplishing his “winter
Dexter meets Judy as he works as a caddy, and he immediately quit to pursue being the type of man that Judy would one day marry. After many years, he meets her again by chance, and they begin a relationship. Although Judy has many other relationships with other men, Dexter decides to deal with it out of pure infatuation with her, and Judy asks him to marry her despite the problematic relationship. They enter this engagement only for it to fail after a month, and Dexter ends up joining the army instead of suffering in sadness. After many years, Dexter hears words of Judy for the first time that cause him to look back on his past, “He had thought that having nothing else to lose he was invulnerable at last—but he knew that he had just lost something more, as surely as if he had married Judy Jones and seen her fade away before his eyes. The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him,” the narrator states (2201). This newly discovered diminishment of Judy’s beauty brings an unimaginable pain to Dexter, and he begins to cry for the loss of his chance of ever fulfilling his dreams. This is the moment in which Dexter realizes that whether he married Judy or not, he would have ended up not accomplishing his “winter