Winter Dreams" of F. Scott Fitzgerald and "Flowering Judas of Katherine Anne Porter"

Cool. Dispassionate. Masters of the art of literary artifice, lies, and characters who wear masks rather than their true selves. Although one author deploys an almost newspaper-like dispassionate style, and the other is more poetic in her use of the language, both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Katherine Anne Porter have been called by these appellations because of the ideological complexity of their characters, and the distanced literary ways in which the authors view these characters. Despite the fact that one might assume Dexter Green of "Winter Dreams" is autobiographical, Fitzgerald narrates his character's striving for social success in America with a tone of cool objectivity. Although she herself traveled to Mexico, Katherine Anne Porter views her protagonist Laura's attempt to embrace a new ideology in Mexico with an equally skeptical eye.

In W.J. Reeves essay, "Lies and...
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