Winter Dreams Summary

Dexter dreams about gaining status and becoming a wealthy young man he fantasized about moving up in class and even becoming golf champion and beating Mr. Hedrick at golf. Eventually Dexter does become that wealthy young man as demonstrated in the novel when he and Judy are having a discussion and he states “"Are you poor?" "No," he said frankly, "I'm probably making more money than any man my age in the Northwest.” I believe Dexter’s dreams are called winter dreams because that's the season where Dexter actually forms his dreams and biggest desires in life. It was those winter dreams that actually encouraged him to quit his job at the golf club, and it was from there where he started to move up in life and achieve his dreams. Like most men in the story Dexter liked Judy because she was beautiful, she was also ambitious as stated in the story “Whatever Judy wanted, she went after with the full pressure of her charm. There was no divergence of method, no jockeying for position or premeditation of effects--there was a very little mental side to any of her affairs. She simply made men conscious to the highest degree of her physical loveliness.” Yet Dexter had an obsession for Judy because she was hard to get, she couldn’t seem to settle down for one specific person, and she belonged to the upper class which in a way makes her almost unattainable for him. I feel like he thought of her as someone he’d never thought he'd be able to have back when he belonged to the lower class. Even though he then became one of the richest young men in their area, it’s almost as if he felt the need to work for her in the same way he had worked and achieved all his other goals. This story is about disillusionment in a couple different ways, but the main points are shown in the way both Judy and Dexter end up at the end of the story. For instance even though Dexter actually achieved all of his goals of becoming wealthy and moving up in class status, he doesn't actually find love, he doesn’t get married to his fiance, who could've ended up being a good wife, and he also doesn’t get married to Judy which was the person he liked the most throughout the story. As a reader I thought he would end up with any of these girls living off the wealth he had made for himself with a happy family, yet instead he ends up wealthy, alone and unhappy. As shown in the end of the story when it states “He had thought that having nothing else to lose he was invulnerable at last--but he knew that he had just lost something more, as surely as if he had married Judy Jones and seen her fade away before his eyes. The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him.” I like that this quotes how even though he obtained the money and the wealth that illusion and hope he had when he first started out was now gone, showing how sometimes the things we want aren’t as amazing as we think them to be. Disillusionment is shown in the way Judy ends up because, you would expect her character to end up with a good husband based on the many suitors she had and you would also expect her to actually keep her looks as she grew older because of how beautiful she was in the early days of the story. Yet her looks fade and she doesn’t end up in a happy marriage. I feel like the story is trying to demonstrate that money, and social class aren’t everything, nor the most important things in life. We as people always tend to long for more, whether it’s more money or to be part of a higher class, or even someone who we think we love and we forget to enjoy life and live in the current moment regardless of whether we have those things or not. I think the story is trying to show that money, looks and social class aren't as important as we cut them out to be, no matter how much we long for these things we might not even end up happy after we obtain them. Which is what happened to Dexter as shown in the end of the story “Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.” Showing how he finally realized even though he got his wealth he was actually no longer happy. I think it’s ironic that Devlin compliments Judy’s eyes in the end of the story because her eyes were complimented at the beginning of the story. As Demonstrated in the story “and in Heaven help us! in the almost passionate quality of her eyes.” Her eyes were described as having a passionate quality, and even as she grew older and lost her looks she didn’t loose that passionate quality her eyes carried when was younger. Much like Antonia, who never lost the glow in her eyes, regardless of the fact that she lost her looks and even her teeth.