Critical Response
Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli described "Winter Dreams" as "the strongest of the Gatsby-cluster stories." He continues,
"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' home from the magazine text and wrote it into the novel as Jay Gatsby's response to Daisy Fay's home."
Tim Randell suggests that “Winter Dreams” should be regarded as “one of modernism’s crowning achievements” because in it Fitzgerald “achieves a dialectical metafiction that grasps the production of capitalist ideology within class relations and print culture, including the forms of literary modernism,” and Fitzgerald does this in 1922—over ten years before Bertolt Brecht coined the term “Verfremdungseffekt” (alienation effect) to describe an identical use of metafiction in the theatre. He argues that the story's form demonstrates that modernism's concern with a "‘lack of communal meaning’ and ‘inescapable subjectivity’ are false epistemological problems” because " metafiction identifies ruling class interests as the collective origin of meaning and ‘reality’ for the entire social body” and "conveys the possibility of counter, collective meanings within the dialectic of class antagonism.”
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