The Importance of Loss in Scott Fitzgeralds Winter Dreams Essay

The Importance of Loss in Scott Fitzgeralds Winter Dreams In the conventional Romance narrative, there is some desirable object whose consummation is the driving preoccupation of the texts protagonist. The aspiration of the Romantic hero is to capture that knotted object that will, nevertheless, consistently out-strip him. These heroes atomic number 18 intimately acquainted with the pain of the exit and suffer deeply for feeling so acutely. However, loss itself, is essential to the compare and is, in fact, a large portion of what establishes the thing as desirable. In the texts of traditional Romanticism the individual has preeminence, and his or her subjective psychological father with the loss in doubtfulness is the major concern. The realization that Romantic subjects playing period plays itself out against the backdrop of a system in which the value of a thing is directly proportionate to its scarcity, is the first step beyond traditional Romanticism. Rea list texts are conscious of the shaping influence that the socio-political has on the individuals ideology - They are consciousness of the impact of Capitalism. The industrialization of that era (late 19th, early 20th century), and the succeeding commodification of everything, creates the crisis of self. The central questions that arises in these contexts concerns the extent to which the individual can be comprehend as individual, capable of imaginative aspirations outside the economic determinism of his society. The central question to Realist authors is Are we dealing with the loss of actualized selves or merely cogs, and if the latter is the case, what render we lost? With this question still relatively unanswered, Scott Fitzgeralds Wi... ...ve (though not the grief itself). He wants to care. Fitzgerald makes his readers care about the loss of illusions that give such color to the worldly concern - those exquisite winter dreams (Preface, Gatsby XV). He compels u s to ask the two large Keatsian questions Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music- Do I wake or sleep? Ode to the Nightingale, Stanza 8 Bibliography Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Winter Dreams. in The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. 4th Edition. New York/London W.W. Norton & Company, 1999. 2125 - 2141. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York Scribner soft-cover book Fiction, 1925. Hegel, G.W.F. Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. New York Continuum, 1990. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of slow Capitalism. Durham Duke University Press, 1991.