Winter Dreams Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald has a very critical view of the world and he illustrates that in the short story “Winter Dreams”. The main character Dexter, lives a life full of want and contempt, longing for Judy. This story is six sections long which infold the unlikely lives of Dexter and Judy. F. Scott Fitzgerald loads his story with lots of symbolism, starting with the title of this short story. Fitzgerald uses the seasons throughout his story to create a depressing mood to help develop Dexter. The title is important because the story is not set in the spring. All of Dexter’s fantasises about Judy came to him during the winter and he met Judy in the winter. “Dexter knew that there was something dismal about this Northern spring, just as he knew there …show more content…
Scott Fitzgerald writes “Winter Dreams” in a style that shows Dexter’s romantic purpose. His style is comprehensible and simple, he uses flashbacks to show the nature of Dexter’s unusual relationship with Judy. “Fitzgerald’s direct narrative style is as clear and straightforward as Dexter’s romantic purpose. The flashbacks and gaps in the story mirror Dexter’s on-again, off-again affair with Judy, though his unswerving obsession with her and the chronicle of it is emphasized here. Fitzgerald’s tale uses poetic language and diction, yet it does not imply more than it states, and, in the story’s episodic structure of fits and starts, it is loose enough to accommodate some things that are almost irrelevant. Dexter’s business success, for example, is fortuitous; the real attraction and attention of the protagonist and the reader is his private life. The third-person limited omniscient point of view allows the reader to know Dexter’s story exclusively through Dexter’s thoughts and reactions to what is happening. It is necessary to remember that Dexter is a romantic idealist and that his temperament is responsible for both his idealization of Judy and his subsequent disillusionment” (Gidmark). Fitzgerald uses several techniques in his writings to draw in the reader to the story such as using third-person omniscient point of …show more content…
He uses romantic and cynical voices to help balance each other out. “In ‘Winter Dreams,’ Fitzgerald experiments with distincts shifts in authorial voice, occasionally with less felicitous effect, but always with a sense that the voice should match the texture of the thing described. I count four authorial voices in the story, but two dominate. The first of these uses the richly romantic prose style which many readers associate with Fitzgerald, the style for which he is either applauded or condemned: a selection of ornate terms so mutually dependent that to alter one is to alter all” (Pike 1). An example of the romantic side of Fitzgerald is,“NEXT EVENING while he waited for her to come down-stairs, Dexter peopled the soft deep summer room and the sun-porch that opened from it with the men who had already loved Judy Jones. He knew the sort of men they were--the men who when he first went to college had entered from the great prep schools with graceful clothes and the deep tan of healthy summers. He had seen that, in one sense, he was better than these men. He was newer and stronger. Yet in acknowledging to himself that he wished his children to be like them he was admitting that he was but the rough, strong stuff from which they eternally sprang” (Fitzgerald 4). And an example of cynical is his critical view of the american dream in his story. Judy is Dexter’s american/winter dream and Fitzgerald ripped that away from