In the short story “Winter Dreams” by F. Scott Fitzgerald a major theme that can be drawn from the description of the upper-class is a falseness of it all. Many of the feeling in which Dexter believed he could achieve by infiltrating the upper class and posing as an “old money” member is proven false once he finally achieves it. The main focus of this story is that in the true upper-class there is an idea that one cannot gain his way into the society, one must be born into it the same way their father was before them. The point that is learned through this is that one cannot achieve happiness through the sole acquirement of money alone, this is going off of the well-known idea that “money can’t buy you happiness”. The view from the bottom is not always what it’s cracked up to be, this is true in the sense that the feeling of completion one believes he’ll have once they make it is not true. There is a certain fog of fakeness amongst the people who live in the upper classes that through success, no matter how much harder one may have worked to achieve it they are not true to …show more content…
In Dexter’s life he believes that he can make it in the upper-class that he can fool them into thinking he is one of them. He shows this though his strict attention to dress and gestures used around them. By doing so he is even able to get it passed Devlin towards the end of the story “So you’re from the Middle West, that’s funny- I thought men like you were probably born and raised on Wall Street.” (Fitzgerald,165), this shows that he gives off the allusion that to outsiders he is one of the upper-class,” raised on Wall Street” meaning he has always been in the status to which he is now. One can say that he has shown the world that you don’t have to be born into wealth by fooling others. This is true only in the sense that people who have not been raised amongst the money believe his