13.

This week in class we read two short stories and compared them to The Great Gatsby.  One of these stories, also by F. Scott Fitzgerald was Winter Dreams.  These two stories have many similarities from plot to theme to symbols. Relating to theme, both Dexter and Gatsby are trying to live in the past and hold onto something that is already gone.  For Dexter, he is trying to make up for lost time by “lessening the gap which lay between his present and past.” (3) Gatsby’s hopeless dream is Daisy.  He continuously tries to go back in time to when Daisy was his but ultimately fails because everything is different now and things can never go back to how they were.  Similarly to how Gatsby can never get Daisy back, Dexter “loved her [Judy], and he would love her until the day he was too old for loving”(8).  A symbol that is common between the two pieces is the “loveless marriage”.  In The Great Gatsby, the two couples, Tom and Daisy and Myrtle and Wilson, have loveless marriages.  In Winter Dreams, Dexter and Irene have a loveless marriage.  This shows how hollow the upper class citizens are during this time period.  There are also major characters from each story who are from the “middle west”.  Gatsby and Dexter are both different from others in their environment because they are not from the east and are considered “new money”.  The last similarity between these two stories demonstrates how fake some characters are.  Gatsby calls everyone “old sport” and Judy “called everyone darling” (7).  By calling everyone these nicknames of affection, it take away from its meaning showing they do not truly care about the people they are calling “old sport” or “darling”.