Discussion Board
While much of Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction teems with irony and sarcasm, his advice about composition in “How to Write with Style” is earnest and sincere. He feels that one should write about that which makes one passionate; indeed, he suggests that “[t]he most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not” (443). This means that, for Vonnegut, writing begins with the inspiration, with the “ideas in your head” (443).
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” is an excellent example of an author staying true to an idea that is important to him. The narrator, Dexter, has a number of intersections with the bewitching Judy Jones. Despite her outrageous behavior, which first manifests itself for Dexter when the eleven-year-old girl nearly clobbers her governess with a golf club, Judy Jones lures Dexter’s interest over and over again throughout her adolescence. This is not surprising: she is “arrestingly beautiful[The] color and the mobility of her mouth [give] a continual impression of flux, of intense life, of passionate vitality – balanced only partially by the sad luxury of her eyes” (123). Whether Judy is hitting older men with her golf shots, only to treat them with disdain while finding her ball for the next shot, or casually wandering up to Dexter, after he is already engaged, only to beguile him out of a solid engagement to poor Irene. The turmoil of difficult relationships is a common theme in other works of Fitzgerald; another story of his that we read this semester was “Babylon Revisited,” in which Charlie Wales is left to sift through the remains of his life after his wife, Helen, had died – as a result of Charlie locking her out of their home on a wintry night after another drunken row. This subject is dear to Fitzgerald; as a result, he comes back to it often, and effectively.
Works Cited
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Winter Dreams.” E-book. Pp. 119-134.
Vonnegut, Kurt. “How to Write with Style.” E-book. Pp. 443-445.
