The Great Gatsby: Style and Legacy

Few novels hold a place in our culture as bright and distinct as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, first published on April 10, 1925. With its enigmatic protagonist, Jay Gatsby, the intriguing narrator, Nick Carraway, and Fitzgerald’s writing style, there’s nothing quite like it. Many of us have been hypnotized by the famous green light that has shone for a hundred years now.

As The Great Gatsby celebrates its centennial, Louise Dean, founder of The Novelry, examines what it is about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing style that makes this portal to American life in the Jazz Age so compelling. Additionally, New York Times bestselling author and writing coach Tara Conklin reflects on the enduring style, themes, and legacy of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece.

The birth of The Great Gatsby

I want to write something new—something extraordinarily beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

Scott Fitzgerald, as he was widely known, began writing The Great Gatsby in the wake of wild times had with his wife Zelda, their friends, and total strangers in New York City and on Long Island at the start of the Roaring Twenties. He wrote steadily through 1923, finishing the first draft by April 1924.

He called it Trimalchio and submitted it to Max Perkins, his editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, in October 1924. Perkins was enthused about the novel’s glamor but was uncertain about how the character of Jay Gatsby was revealed. 

In 1925, Fitzgerald and Zelda spent six weeks in Italy, where he revised the book to meet Perkins’s recommendations (you can view F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original manuscript here). In April 1925, six months after submitting the initial draft of Trimalchio, The Great Gatsby as we now know it was published.

Studying F. Scott Fitzgerald’s style in The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby commonly ranks as one of the best novels of the last century, so it bears close study. When comparing both versions (you can buy the original, Trimalchio, here), the first three chapters are almost identical.

In the first chapter, we see just one change, which tells us this chapter was carefully constructed and set in stone. Not a word of it was accidental, haphazard, or ‘lucky.’

On the second page, Fitzgerald makes a deft, poetic substitution. In the original version, he describes Nick Carraway as being bemused by ‘the abortive sorrows and unjustified elations of men.’ Later, this became ‘the abortive sorrows and shortwinded elations of men.’

Why ‘shortwinded’?

Because it’s got ‘wind’ in it. Read on...

Fitzgerald programs the reader’s mind

It’s in the first chapter that the writer sets out their stall. The tone, the writing style, and the theme are set here as a directive for all that follows. That’s why authors struggle over this chapter. I write and rewrite mine hundreds of times.

I’ve always thought that a ‘good’ writing style—proper practice—avoids repeating the same words. I’m careful not to do so in my books, which is why I was surprised by my forensic look at the content of The Great Gatsby’s first chapter. Here, Fitzgerald repeats certain words deliberately and obviously. So, what he was up to?

...something extraordinarily beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

In material terms, this means color, elements of nature, heightened sensibility, and tangible emotion.

Neurolinguistic programming in The Great Gatsby book

Fitzgerald was writing long before the term neuro-linguistic programming (using language to program behavior) was invented in the 1970s. But what he’s doing here is akin to what illusionist Derren Brown does. 

Some people have claimed that Brown uses neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), which consists of a range of magical ‘tricks,’ misdirection, and—most intriguing—using repeated words and subtle subliminal cues to condition his audience to give him a specific desired response. 

In his book Tricks of the Mind, Brown mentions that he attended an NLP course with Richard Bandler, co-creator of NLP, and the language patterns he uses to suggest behaviors are very similar to those used by Bandler. (Watch him convince Simon Pegg to buy a red BMX bike.)

The connection between NLP and Fitzgerald’s literary devices

The powerful first chapter of The Great Gatsby shows Fitzgerald purposefully repeating words to create patterns that form a beautiful net—an alluring spider’s web that entraps the reader in this alternative ‘beautiful’ world. 

(To ensure literary acclaim, he uses a few well-turned aphorisms, as one does in the first chapter, but this is a popular, populist book created to hypnotize and persuade, to lure and involve.)

Fitzgerald’s word choices

The first chapter is 5,888 words long, and the words used fall into these thematic categories:

Color

• White: 9
• Right: 7
• Light: 6
• Rose: 4
• Red: 3
• Glowing: 3
• Silver: 3

Elemental

• Evening: 6
• Night: 6
• Day: 5
• Wind: 4
• Warm: 4
• Summer: 4
• Windows: 4
• Water: 4
• Longest day: 3
• Blew: 3
• Bay: 3
• Curtains: 3
• World: 3

Sensory

• Eyes: 10
• Voice: 9
• Feels/feeling/felt: 8
• Face: 8
• Moment: 7
• Her voice: 6
• Heart: 6
• Life: 5
• Physical: 4
• Murmur: 4
• Her eyes: 4
• Enormous: 4
• Whisper: 3
• Sound: 3
• Singing: 3
• Intimate: 3
• Hands: 3
• Candles: 3
• Expression: 3
• Beautiful: 2

Sexual attraction

• Romantic: 5
• Murmur: 4
• Laughed: 4
• She laughed: 3
• Secret: 3
• Slender: 3
• Thrilling: 3
• Lovely: 3
• Her face: 3
• Her head: 3
• Hulking: 3

Childish innocence

• Young: 7
• Surprised: 4
• Remember: 4
• Story: 3
• Charming: 3
• Idea: 3
• Absolute: 3
• Suddenly: 3

I’d be unlikely to use the word romantic five times in a whole novel, let alone the first chapter. These are really significant numbers that hint at the deeper meaning Fitzgerald hoped to convey through his word choices.

White, evening, eyes, romantic, young.

There’s the novel’s DNA. 

The introduction of Daisy Buchanan

Nick Carraway’s cousin Daisy Buchanan is name-checked the most in the first chapter, with 28 mentions. Daisy, living on East Egg, is the guide to this transient, translucent world of fictitious beauty.

The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.

‘I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.’

She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

By looking at the DNA of the first chapter, we get a powerful insight into how Fitzgerald purposefully created the great rose-tinted bubble of Gatsby.

We need not be ashamed of repetition. Here, the material is controlled while achieving the illusion that the words are unfolding as naturally as events do, in a way that is as low and thrilling as cousin Daisy’s timbre.

I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen,’ a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Who is Jay Gatsby?

This novel is more than a medley of rhetorical devices and descriptive sentences. As the reader floats through the glamorous Long Island communities of East Egg and West Egg, Fitzgerald builds his sentences word by word with forensic application, fashioning the house of his novel with the right bricks. That’s how ‘genius’ happens—deadly focus, pre-consideration, tight deployment, determination, and vision and revision.

The author keeps his eye on the central question of the novel. Who is the main character? Who is Jay Gatsby?

The lavish parties thrown at Gatsby’s house on Long Island aren’t there as purely descriptive pictures of a land of opportunity and success. They’re there so characters can repeat the three most important words of the story to the reader.

Who is Gatsby?

Why The Great Gatsby continues to endure

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is one of the most celebrated books of the modern age. It’s the greatest of the Great American Novels, required reading in virtually every American high school English class, and an inspiration for movies starring Robert Redford, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Carey Mulligan—not to mention plays, musicals, radio adaptations, a ballet, an opera, and countless social media memes and cat jokes (have you seen The Great Catsby ?).

Fitzgerald’s masterpiece has been an established classic for so long, we almost forget to ask why. But on the occasion of Gatsby’s birthday, it’s worth posing the question: what makes Gatsby so enduringly great?

Louise has already shown us the magic and mastery of Fitzgerald’s prose, and on a line-by-line level, it’s difficult to find a more stunning collection of sentences. But remember: 1925 was also the year that saw the publication of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. The prose in these great works of the Roaring Twenties is certainly worthy of high praise, yet none has captured the public imagination across generations in quite the same way as Gatsby. 

I’ve read The Great Gatsby three times. First, as a junior in high school, sitting in the front row of Mrs. Ames’s English class (I was a geek). Second, in my mid-20s, when I decided very self-consciously that I needed to read more ‘classic’ literature, but found tomes like Moby-Dick or War and Peace too, well, long (I was a geek with a limited attention span). Finally, in preparation for this article.

If someone asked me back then why Gatsby is so enduring, I probably would have said the passionate love affair, the glamorous Daisy, Jordan Baker, and the parties on West Egg!  

But in re-reading the book as a writer with a few years under my belt, I’ve come to a different conclusion. Both the novel and the history of its creation—and its creator—strike me as inexpressibly sad. Tragedy appears both on and off the page, the two mirroring each other in the most poignant of ways.

Here, then, is a brief look at how Fitzgerald’s life reflected events and themes in Gatsby and why the writer, and the book, continue to move readers today.

{{blog-banner-9="/blog-banners"}}

The Fitzgeralds’ real-life romance

The love affair between Scott and his wife, Zelda Sayres Fitzgerald, is as tragically bewitching as the fictional love between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. Theirs was a romance for the ages, both passionate and mutually destructive. (For Zelda’s story, I recommend the wonderful Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald  by Therese Anne Fowler, one of our Hero Books.)

When Scott and Zelda married in 1920, she was an 18-year-old southern belle from a wealthy family, and he was a newly successful novelist, having just published This Side of Paradise to critical and commercial acclaim. Zelda’s parents initially opposed the union due to Fitzgerald’s uncertain financial prospects and unimpressive Midwestern upbringing but allowed the marriage to proceed after the novel’s success.

This same predicament forms the backbone of Fitzgerald’s plot in Gatsby. After being rejected as unpromising, Gatsby returns to Long Island and West Egg as a self-made millionaire. Gatsby believed he could still win over Daisy but, unlike Fitzgerald with Zelda, he is too late: she has already married Tom Buchanan, a philanderer and a brute who comes from old money. Despite Gatsby’s new wealth, Daisy, across the water on East Egg, is beyond him.

The Jazz Age and the ‘Lost Generation’

The Fitzgeralds embodied the excess, glamor, and hope of the 1920s Jazz Age, a time when women finally won the right to vote and World War I—‘the war to end all wars’—was over.

Zelda and Scott both rejected the values with which they’d been raised—Zelda to be a quiet, complacent wife and Scott to be a responsible, down-to-earth provider. Similarly, the Lost Generation of artists, including Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and T.S. Eliot, were rejecting the artistic and social conventions of previous generations by re-inventing themselves and their world.  

This sense of freedom and hedonism can be seen in the parties thrown by Jay Gatsby at his West Egg mansion. The language Fitzgerald uses perfectly captures the headiness and romance of these gatherings and this age:

There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden... By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz... The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

It’s impossible not to swoon at old photos of Zelda, with her flapper hairstyle and drop-waist dress, standing alongside Scott in a dapper white suit, his hair slicked back. They glow with style, elegance, and joy—though, as we now know, it was all an illusion.

From promise to ruin

The socio-economic themes of Gatsby mirror the financial rollercoaster ridden by the Fitzgeralds themselves. As was customary in many privileged families at the time, Zelda was raised with the expectation that her husband would provide financially, and throughout the roaring Jazz Age, Fitzgerald did so. They traveled widely throughout Europe, wore the most fashionable clothes, and hosted the biggest parties. Their only child—a daughter, Scottie, born in 1921—traveled with them along with a revolving cast of nannies.

When The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, Fitzgerald was banking on its success, his previous two novels having sold well. But Gatsby was met with lukewarm reviews and lackluster sales. Fitzgerald deemed it a failure and relied principally on his short stories—he wrote 164 over his lifetime—to support their lavish lifestyle. 

But, as Gatsby teaches us, no party lasts forever. The Fitzgeralds spent money faster than they could make it. When the stock market crashed in 1929, Fitzgerald’s tales of parties and champagne fell out of favor. The Great Depression coincided with Zelda’s deteriorating mental health and her hospitalization in expensive sanatoriums in Europe and the U.S.  

Although theories abound as to the nature and cause of Zelda’s illness, there’s no doubt that her issues took a terrible toll on Fitzgerald and Scottie, and on Zelda’s creative aspirations as a writer, painter, and dancer. Fitzgerald, who struggled with drink his entire life, fell into alcoholism and despair.

The American Dream

All of Fitzgerald’s frustrated striving—for Zelda, for wealth, for literary reputation—is reflected in The Great Gatsby. As Maureen Corrigan writes:

[The novel] nails who we want to be as Americans. Not who we are; who we want to be. It’s that wanting that runs through every page of Gatsby, making it our Greatest American Novel.
—Maureen Corrigan, So We Read On

Narrator Nick Carraway yearns to fit into Gatsby’s privileged world. He’s a Midwestern boy come to New York to seek his fortune in the bond trade, and in Gatsby’s car, his glorious West Egg mansion, and his lavish lifestyle, Nick meets this dream of nouveau riche success head-on.

Gatsby, however, is striving for something different. He puts on spectacles of wealth only to win back his past love, Daisy, a woman who on the page seems unworthy of such adoration. She’s glamorous and beautiful, sure, but she also comes across as shallow and vain (not to mention married to Tom Buchanan). It’s the idea of her that Gatsby loves: the fantasy. His struggle, much like Fitzgerald’s own, was to prove himself worthy of that love. 

Fitzgerald’s ability to capture the essential hope and contradiction of the American dream still rings true today. Both Nick and Gatsby ultimately find that the object of their striving is illusory. Nick leaves, moving back to the Midwest; Gatsby dies a senseless death after Daisy’s rejection. Poor Myrtle Wilson is dead; George Wilson, too. There was no true love to be won, no urbane sophistication to be found. There was only the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, the green light that Gatsby reaches for but never quite touches.

Tragic endings

Fitzgerald spent his last years working as a screenwriting ‘hack’ in Hollywood to make ends meet, continuing to support Zelda and her mental health treatment financially while living in LA with the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. He died of a heart attack in 1940 at the age of 44. At the time of his death, The Great Gatsby had sold fewer than 25,000 copies.  

Zelda’s death eight years later, at the age of 47, was equally premature and shocking. On the night of March 11, 1948, a fire broke out at the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Nine women died, including Zelda, who had been sedated and was locked in her room on the fifth floor.

Scott and Zelda’s tragic and senseless endings, much like Gatsby’s own, add to readers’ continued fascination with Fitzgerald’s novel. There’s a deep poignancy to this story of a self-destructive, yearning writer who wrote so beautifully about a self-destructive, yearning man named Gatsby.

Today, those words set down a century ago continue to move readers worldwide. It’s why The Great Gatsby is still considered one of the Greatest American Novels, with a story, theme, and characters that ring deeply true one hundred years later.

Write your novel with coaching from Tara Conklin

If you’d benefit from some knowledgeable authorial guidance and you’re writing historical fiction, contemporary and women’s fiction, or literary fiction, you’ll find Tara a warm and insightful writing coach.

‍

Join us on the world’s best creative writing courses to create, write, and complete your book. Sign up and start today.