Authors accomplish direct characterization when they closely describe characters's looks and traits. Sometimes it is the narrator who provides it, or it can be the words of another character in the work.

Dexter Green has a decisive and self-confident personality, seen first on the day that he abruptly quits his job as a caddy. He tells Mr. Jones, who pleads with Dexter to caddy for him, that "I decided I was too old." Dexter's winter dreams lead him to sidestep the then-conventional worlds of the stock market and sales to become a self-made businessman. He "borrowed a thousand dollars on his college degree and his confident mouth, and bought a partnership in a laundry."

Once Dexter has prospered, he returns briefly to the golf club where he had caddied as a boy and finds that he "was impressed by the tremendous superiority he felt toward Mr. T. A. Hedrick, who was a bore and not even a good golfer any more." Dexter has surpassed the men whom he had formerly held in awe.

Fitzgerald builds the characterization of Dexter Green through descriptions of his confident decision-making and unshakeable belief in himself. Dexter is widely regarded as a good catch because "he was an eligible young man, now, and popular with down-town fathers."

This is such a wonderful story. All of F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing evokes such clear images, and his characterization becomes very clear from his use of language. For example, as the narrator says, "as so frequently would be the case in the future, Dexter was unconsciously dictated to by his winter dreams.’’ Dextor is frivolous but maybe only in what he places value on. He cares for wealth, pretty girls, and status. This is played out in his relationship with Judy and the way he lives his life. His winter dream (his idea of a perfect life) emcompasses wealth, pretty girls, and status, and it is for that reason that he is chasing those things. This is why he takes the fact that Judy has lost her beauty so seriously. The loss of her beauty is the loss of his dream.