The Importance of Loss in Scott Fitzgeralds Winter Dreams Essay

The Importance of Loss in Scott Fitzgeralds spend Dreams In the traditional Romance narrative, there is some desirable physical object whose consummation is the driving preoccupation of the texts protagonist. The aspiration of the sentimentalist hero is to find that elusive object that will, nevertheless, consistently out-strip him. These heroes are intimately acquainted with the inconvenience oneself of the loss and suffer deeply for feeling so acutely. However, loss itself, is inborn to the equation 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 experience with the loss in question is the major concern. The realization that Romantic subjects drama plays itself out against the backdrop of a system in which the nurse of a thing is directly proportionate to its scarcity, is the first step beyond traditional Romanticism. Re alist 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 twentieth century), and the subsequent commodification of everything, creates the crisis of self. The primordial questions that arises in these contexts concerns the extent to which the individual can be perceived 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(prenominal) is the case, what have we lost? With this question still relatively unanswered, Scott Fitzgeralds Wi... ...ve (though not the regret itself). He wants to care. Fitzgerald makes his readers care about the loss of illusions that give such cloak to the world - those exquisite winter dreams (Preface, Gatsby XV). He c ompels us to ask the 2 great 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. in the altogether York/London W.W. Norton & Company, 1999. 2125 - 2141. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1925. Hegel, G.W.F. Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. New York Continuum, 1990. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or the Cultural system of logic of Late Capitalism. Durham Duke University Press, 1991.