The Foreshadow of a Famous Novel Without being known by the public, authors can release prototypes to their novels years before the novels themselves. When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby in 1925, he claimed that his short story, “Winter Dreams”, written three years earlier, was a rough-draft or prototype of the novel. After reading both of these works, it is clear to the reader that this claim of Fitzgerald’s was correct. Throughout the plots of both stories, there are evident recognizable similarities between the characters and themes which are difficult to dismiss. Although “Winter Dreams” and The Great Gatsby have different endings and other minor differences, the short story is a prototype of the novel because of how the characters
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Not only are the characters in both of Fitzgerald’s works similar, but the two main male characters share the similarity of rejecting the past. In “Winter Dreams”, Dexter is chasing after Judy Jones nearly his whole life. When Judy and Dexter are together, Dexter must go off to war and years later he returns and hears from a friend that Judy Jones is married to a man named Lud Simms. Dexter believes Judy should love him, and that her past with anyone else is irrelevant. He cannot accept any reality besides the one where Judy is young and beautiful- and his. The author writes, “For the first time in his life he felt like getting very drunk” (19). This desire of Dexter’s is a result of him wanting to try to drink away his past without Judy Jones. Likewise, in the Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby has a relationship with Daisy Buchanan but also has to go off to war. After the …show more content…
Jay Gatsby and Dexter also both showcase the “American Dream”, which is essentially starting a life for yourself by working to get money and a nice house and comfortable living situation. In the prototype, or the short story, Dexter lives out the American Dream because he goes from lower middle-class to a wealthy man who earned all his money. However from the prototype to the real novel, Fitzgerald seemed to have changed this aspect, because Gatsby instead gets his money from illegal affairs and ends up dying with all of his riches gone to waste. Overall, after reading these novels a reader can learn that the American Dream might not be all that it is worked up to be, especially if the person who is achieving it is not romantically
Not only are the characters in both of Fitzgerald’s works similar, but the two main male characters share the similarity of rejecting the past. In “Winter Dreams”, Dexter is chasing after Judy Jones nearly his whole life. When Judy and Dexter are together, Dexter must go off to war and years later he returns and hears from a friend that Judy Jones is married to a man named Lud Simms. Dexter believes Judy should love him, and that her past with anyone else is irrelevant. He cannot accept any reality besides the one where Judy is young and beautiful- and his. The author writes, “For the first time in his life he felt like getting very drunk” (19). This desire of Dexter’s is a result of him wanting to try to drink away his past without Judy Jones. Likewise, in the Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby has a relationship with Daisy Buchanan but also has to go off to war. After the …show more content…
Jay Gatsby and Dexter also both showcase the “American Dream”, which is essentially starting a life for yourself by working to get money and a nice house and comfortable living situation. In the prototype, or the short story, Dexter lives out the American Dream because he goes from lower middle-class to a wealthy man who earned all his money. However from the prototype to the real novel, Fitzgerald seemed to have changed this aspect, because Gatsby instead gets his money from illegal affairs and ends up dying with all of his riches gone to waste. Overall, after reading these novels a reader can learn that the American Dream might not be all that it is worked up to be, especially if the person who is achieving it is not romantically