Winter Dreams

“Winter Dreams” first appeared in Metropolitan Magazine (December 1922) and was collected in All The Sad Young Men (1926). Written while Fitzgerald was planning his third novel, The Great Gatsby, it is the strongest of the Gatsby-cluster stories. Like the novel, it examines a boy whose ambitions become identified with a selfish rich girl. Indeed, Fitzgerald removed Dexter Green’s response to Judy Jones’s home from the magazine text and wrote it into the novel as Jay Gatsby’s response to Daisy Fay’s home.

The four closing paragraphs of this story are distinguished by Fitzgerald’s complex explication of Dexter’s sense of mutability: he grieves for the loss of his capacity to grieve.

Read the story here.

winterd1

Answer these questions on a new blog page called Winter Dreams.

1. What social classes are described in part one and what are their lives like?

2. What details from the story indicate that Dexter is an ambitious man?

3. What are Dexter’s motivations?

4. What inferences can you make about Judy’s character in the third part of the story?

5. Why do Dexter and the other men put up with Judy’s careless behavior?

6. Does the narrator sympathize with Dexter or think that he is a fool for falling for Judy?

7. The story is like a fairy tale. Agree or disagree with this statement and provide lots of details for support.

winterd2

print

Print Friendly, PDF & Email