At the beginning of Part II of Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams," the narrator comments that while the quality and the occasion of Dexter's dreams alters, the substance of these dreams--"the stuff of them"--remains the same. That is, Dexter yearns for that elusive quality of the rich which makes them desirable.
At one time F. Scott Fitzgerald grumbled to Ernest Hemingway, "The rich are different from you and me." Despite Hemingway's cryptic response, "Yes, they have more money," Fitzgerald was never convinced that the rich did not hold some magical quality. It is this very magic of which Dexter dreams. Like Fitzgerald himself, he is convinced that the wealthy are somehow superior beings. Consequently, he pursues an education at an "older and more famous" university in the East, rather than the state university to which his father would have paid the costs, because he hopes that at a prestigious school in the East he can associate with the wealthy. Perhaps then he, too, can attain "the glittering things." Clearly, this attainment of the "glittering things" is what composes Dexter's winter dreams.
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