Comparing the Great Gatsby and Winter Dreams
Fitzgerald Essay
“And one fine morning...” With this phrase, appearing on the last page of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Great Gatsby, narrator Nick Carraway effectively sums up the motivating force that drives the novel’s titular character, Jay Gatsby. It is the achievement of the American Dream that hangs – unreached – at the end of Carraway’s sentence. In this way, the story leaves us with a similar lasting taste of longing, the bittersweet realization that powerful as the Dream may be, it is just that: a dream. And yet, while the Dream, like the sentence – is never fully realized, this unrealization is itself a source of motivation for continuance. There is still the promise of that “one fine morning” making it impossible to condemn the novel, as it often is, as Fitzgerald’s dismissal of the American Dream. Rather, The Great Gatsby is an aggressive consideration that manages to at once explode the illusions that facilitate and propagate the Dream, while at the same time showing compassion – and even hope – for the Dream’s continuance. In this way, Gatsby succeeds where Winter Dreams fails. While the latter short story reads as a precursor for the novel as similarities abound, the respective conclusions differ greatly. Though Gatsby dies, he does so in a way echoed by Carraway’s abbreviated sentence. He dies unsatisfied but not yet defeated, not yet resigned. Conversely, Dexter Green (Winter Dreams) lives, but does so with the sad conclusion that “The dream was gone”. Fitzgerald’s dissatisfaction with this resignation was not just literary, but also personal. As he states of optimistic, dream-like ambition, “It is the history of all aspiration – not just the American Dream, but the human dream, and if I came at the end of it, that too is a place in the line of the pioneers.” The stories are similar, but The Great Gatsby is better because of the ending- as opposed to the ending of Winter Dreams.
When reading both of Fitzgerald’s works, the reader would
“And one fine morning...” With this phrase, appearing on the last page of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Great Gatsby, narrator Nick Carraway effectively sums up the motivating force that drives the novel’s titular character, Jay Gatsby. It is the achievement of the American Dream that hangs – unreached – at the end of Carraway’s sentence. In this way, the story leaves us with a similar lasting taste of longing, the bittersweet realization that powerful as the Dream may be, it is just that: a dream. And yet, while the Dream, like the sentence – is never fully realized, this unrealization is itself a source of motivation for continuance. There is still the promise of that “one fine morning” making it impossible to condemn the novel, as it often is, as Fitzgerald’s dismissal of the American Dream. Rather, The Great Gatsby is an aggressive consideration that manages to at once explode the illusions that facilitate and propagate the Dream, while at the same time showing compassion – and even hope – for the Dream’s continuance. In this way, Gatsby succeeds where Winter Dreams fails. While the latter short story reads as a precursor for the novel as similarities abound, the respective conclusions differ greatly. Though Gatsby dies, he does so in a way echoed by Carraway’s abbreviated sentence. He dies unsatisfied but not yet defeated, not yet resigned. Conversely, Dexter Green (Winter Dreams) lives, but does so with the sad conclusion that “The dream was gone”. Fitzgerald’s dissatisfaction with this resignation was not just literary, but also personal. As he states of optimistic, dream-like ambition, “It is the history of all aspiration – not just the American Dream, but the human dream, and if I came at the end of it, that too is a place in the line of the pioneers.” The stories are similar, but The Great Gatsby is better because of the ending- as opposed to the ending of Winter Dreams.
When reading both of Fitzgerald’s works, the reader would