English Language and Literature Studies; Vol. 5, No.

2; 2015
ISSN 1925-4768 E-ISSN 1925-4776
Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Unique Literary and Writing Style

Fahimeh Keshmiri1 & Mina Mahdikhani1
1
Fatemeh Zahra Pardis, Farhangian University, Isfahan, Iran
Correspondence: Fahimeh Keshmiri, Fatemeh Zahra Pardis, Farhangian University, Isfahan, Iran. Tel:
98-913-030-3611. E-mail: [email protected]

Received: January 13, 2015 Accepted: February 13, 2015 Online Published: May 31, 2015
doi:10.5539/ells.v5n2p78 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ells.v5n2p78

Abstract
The importance of including Fitzgerald in American Literature anthologies cannot be overestimated. He believed
that he was an original. Fitzgerald's style is completely his own and perhaps the most incomparable aspect of his
prose. It is neither so subtly different that it takes perfect pitch to identify nor so eccentric as to be self-consciously
sui generis as some other modernist writers. He frequently exploited and became famous for his material rather
than because of his technical innovations. The central thematic concerns of Fitzgerald were those of his time and of
his country. As writers' material—the subjects, experiences, ideas that they examine and re-examine—is what
makes them the kinds of authors they are, this paper tries to investigate more intensely on the influence of three
important literary movements: Realism, Modernism and Existentialism on Fitzgerald’s creative works, his
material, subjects and themes and techniques and style based on his creative novels.
Keywords: F. Scott Fitzgerald, American Dream, Double Vision, Emotional Bankruptcy, saturation method,
writing style, literary movements
1. Introduction
F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the most renowned writers of the 20th century that his heritage and the public
fascination of his lifestyle have significant roles in the context of world literature. The realistic effort of the late
19th century writers—especially in this case F. Scott Fitzgerald—who accurately shows life and its problems
attempted to give a comprehensive picture of modern life by presenting the entire world picture. He did not try to
give one view of life but instead attempted to show the different manners, classes, and stratification of life in
America and he created this picture by combining a wide variety of details derived from observation and
documentation to approach the norm of his experience. Along with this technique, he compared the objective or
absolute existence in America to that of the universal truths, or observed facts of life. Thus, the Realistic elements
are obvious in all Fitzgerald's works. The main objective of this paper is conducting a scientific study of unique
style and writing techniques of Fitzgerald in the field of literature and creating an updated perspective of the
reflection of three literary movements Realism, Modernism and Existentialism in his works. F. Scott Fitzgerald
occupied an outstanding place in the annuals of American Literary history in the arena of twentieth century
American fiction. He best represented the Roaring Twenties with his evocative works. The importance of this
study and the necessity of awareness of literature and Fitzgerald’s life and environment at that time seems useful
according to the study of literature.
The fact that there is a perennial interest in Fitzgerald that has resulted in dozens of books and hundreds of articles
also the variety of opinions about Fitzgerald’s works has been expressed by several of the most famous writers.
One of the primary and valuable sources we paid attention to, is Judith S. Baughman and Mathew J. Bruccoli, The
Literary Masters; F. Scott Fitzgerald, 2000. These series provide educators and researchers a source featuring not
only literary movements and biographical data but also discussions of significant cultural and historical aspects of
literature. The Literary Masters Series lights up biographical details of an author's life, providing a point of
reference that gives insight into experiences that may have influenced the author's subject matter and writing style.
The next literary source is The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cambridge university press, 2002.
This particular volume has a great amount of information both in terms of analysis of Fitzgerald’s works, and the
ramifications their receptions had on Fitzgerald himself and on his careered. It takes note of Fitzgerald's career in
terms of both his writing and his life, and presents the reader with a full and accessible picture of each, against the
background of American social and cultural change in the early decades of the twentieth century. The Far Side of
Paradise, a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald by Arthur Mizener and a new introduction by Mathew J. Bruccoli,

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2006, was the first biography about Fitzgerald to be published and is ascribed with renewing public interest in the
subject. Mizener believed that there are three concentric areas of interest in a study of Scott Fitzgerald. At the heart
of it is his work, One area of interest in this book is the time and place in which he lived. His time and place
haunted him every minute of his life and the effect of his preoccupation is what most obviously distinguishes his
work from that of the good sociological novelists like Doss Passos on the one hand and, on the other, from that of
the emotional and self-regarding novelists.
Autumn Fontenot in an article by the name of The Writing Style of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Prezi, 2013, mentioned that
F. Scott Fitzgerald is known as one of the most brilliant writers of his time. The most obvious feature that he is
known for is his wonderful writing style. Though Fitzgerald did take a few techniques from his idol authors, he
created his own strategies that captured a deep and meaningful message. Fitzgerald utilizes many writing
techniques to draw the reader in and create his own unique style. He uses diction, similes, syntax, and rhetorical
strategies to convey his message and understanding of his novels' qualities.
2. Method
The methodology and technique to be used in writing this paper will be such that will make it a comprehensive,
insightful and stimulating one. Different kinds of resources has been used such as printed and digital library books,
academic journal articles about Fitzgerald's life and works and found background information on Fitzgerald in
order to establish uniqueness of Fitzgerald's literary writing style and techniques.
3. Discussion
Many authors after the First World War created a new literature of long-term merit that shattered conservative
taboos in their expression of physical and psychological reality. This was the beginning of Modernism, which
although, influenced by Realism and often mentioned to as postponement of naturalistic values, was the answer to
America’s new-found problems. Fitzgerald was a non-expatriate who developed a modernist literature that was
connected to American traditions but, what all the modernists shared was a belief in literature's significance in the
contemporary world, and the need for it to be repeatedly vital.
Like realists, the modernists and naturalists focused on changes on society and used symbolism, to attack society's
problems and make their own judgments of the basic foundations of American life. Indeed both attacked the
different moral dilemmas in the society. The only difference was that these dilemmas were different. So, author
like Fitzgerald directed the modernistic renaissance by using realistic and naturalistic techniques. He is thought of
as a romantic writer, but he combined these qualities with Realism, meaning accuracy of observation and
characterization. This Side of Paradise was read as a realistic account of Princeton undergraduate experience and
the next novel Tender is the Night provides a convincing account of expatriate life and a profound examination of
character deterioration. Besides it should be noted that the effects of Fitzgerald's exposure to naturalism are evident
in his novelette May Day and in the novel The Beautiful and Damned.
What is significant about this author is the influence of European Existentialisms on his canon of works and the
depth of the cultural moments he capture in his art. For example in The Great Gatsby the dominant strain of
cultural discourse, which focused on the applicability of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophies of modern civilization
and the modern individual to American interests and concerns is reflected. Like the existentialists, Fitzgerald
recognizes the inadequacy of American democracy in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and
rejects the capitalistic values, identities and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly
oppressive social and political structures of American culture. For Fitzgerald what are at stake are the individual,
the inventive spirit, and the life of the nation and they echoes all the way through his early works, a sentiment
manifest in their portraits of incapable, lost, aimless, and emotionally unfulfilled characters. Extensively, he
expatriated himself since he felt America no longer provided an environment for the real growth of the individual
or for the cultivation of the resourceful spirit, something particularly Europe, and Paris, not only offered, but
encouraged and held in high esteem. Indeed he presents his readers with art of living for his time, for his readers’
personal, unquestionably biased lives.
Throughout his twenty-year career as a professional writer, Fitzgerald was often regarded as a not-quite-serious
literary figure. This assessment was fueled by his image as a free-spending, heavy-drinking playboy and by the
material he often exploited: the romantic interests of young people; the pursuit of wealth, success, and happiness
by ambitious poor boys; the concerns of affluent, upper-middle-class men and women. Fitzgerald's material
seemed, in short, the stuff of popular, escapist fiction rather than of enduring literature.

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Writers' material—the subjects, experiences, ideas that they examine and re-examine—is what makes them the
kinds of authors they are. Writers and material are inseparable, as Fitzgerald explained in his 1933 essay One
Hundred False Starts: “Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves—that's the truth. We have two or three great and
moving experiences in our lives—experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else
has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated
and rewarded and humbled in just that that way ever before. Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell
our two or three stories—each time in a new disguise- maybe ten times, may be a hundred, as long as people will
listen.” (Fitzgerald, 1958, p. 132).
Fitzgerald's experiences include his growing up with a sense of being a poor boy in a rich man's world but also with
a sense of his own special destiny: both perceptions led him to believe in and pursue the American Dream of
success, personal fulfillment, and wealth.
Another of his formative experiences was his dramatic early success as a writer and celebrity, which was followed
by his later collapse into Emotional Bankruptcy and anonymity: his greatest work from the late 1920s through the
mid of 1930s examines the decline of potential heroes, a decline colored by their own and their creator's sense of
regret. Another of his life- and work-shaping experiences was the intense romance and devastating misfortune of
his relationship with Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: virtually all of his important female characters reflect some facet of
Zelda and his involvement with her.
3.1 Subjects and Themes
Theme is most dramatically expressed through character, and Fitzgerald used the people he created to convey his
personal vision of the world. In his five novels and 160 stories, he portrayed a wide range of characters. Though he
may be most closely identified with his debutantes, college boys, and ambitious young men seeking the
fulfillments promised by wealth, social standing, and personal happiness, he also provided memorable portraits of
the other kinds of people.
Because they are drawn from his own experience, many of Fitzgerald's characters manifest recognizably
Fitzgeraldian qualities. His men often combine ambition for early success with the desire for romantic love and the
achievement of an ideal life. They often lack the hardness to fulfill their dreams. Certain of Fitzgerald's male
characters are actually weak, but the majority of the men portrayed by Fitzgerald fail because the objects of their
pursuit do not and cannot measure up to the men's conceptions of them. Because the quests of Fitzgerald's best
male characters usually are played out in the real world, their objects, their dreams, are assailed by inevitable
change and loss, so that youthful beauty fades; innocence hardens into cynicism; and aspiration fade when tested
against harsh experience. “Can't repeat the past?' [Gatsby] cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!”
(Fitzgerald, 1951, p. 116) Gatsby is wrong, but his faith makes him unforgettable.
Women like Fitzgerald's female characters scarcely existed in American fiction before 1920. The best of his
heroines are brave, determined, beautiful or attractive, intelligent (but not educated), and chaste. These young
women, many of them still in their teens, also understand that their lives depend upon the marital choices they
make. Fitzgerald clearly admired attractive, independent, unconventional women, but he also tended to treat his
most fully developed women characters rather critically. Many of his most complex female characters are
incapable of sharing the lofty dreams and aspirations of the men who love them.
Fitzgerald was not a purely objective reporter or chronicler of the Jazz Age and the 1930s but instead brought a
strong moral perspective to his work. His central characters undergo processes of self-assessment (Amory Blaine,
for example), or they judge others (Nick Carraway), or they are judged by Fitzgerald himself, who constantly
measured the behavior of characters against implicit standards of responsibility, honor, and courage.
One of this writer's main methods was his adaption of a standpoint that the critique Malcolm Cowley labeled
Double Vision, the discernment of events both as an outsider and as an insider. One of the paramount and mainly
recognizable embodiments of double vision in Fitzgerald's work is the narrator of The Great Gatsby, Nick
Carraway, who both takes part in and explains the action of the novel. In the second chapter Nick describes himself
as “an entangled” in as well as a “watcher” over the events and his position as both insider and outsider remains
intact throughout the novel.
For many of the young expatriate writers, the American Dream—the belief that aspiration could be fulfilled
through imagination and hard work—seemed dead or at least terribly corrupted. They thus moved to Europe,
which appeared to offer a freer, more stimulating, and perhaps less hypocritical environment. Although Fitzgerald
lived abroad for nearly six years and was one of the major American writers to emerge during 1920s, he did not
share the disillusionment with or contempt for their country of certain expatriate Americans. Instead, he was

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unabashedly patriotic, believing that America remained the land of opportunity of idealism, of great potentialities
and possibilities. For Fitzgerald the American Dream was inextricably connected with the country's history, which
he called in a note accompanying material for The Love of the Last Tycoon “the most beautiful history in the
world.” (Fitzgerald, 1978, p. 332)
In his novels and stories, Fitzgerald revealed not only the fulfillment of the American Dream but also the many
ways it could be debased and distorted. His most evocative protagonists—among them Jay Gatsby and Dick Diver
—share that quality of the idea and willingness of the heart defined by Fitzgerald as quintessentially American.
Although they are frequently disappointed in their quests, it is not finally the dream that fails them but instead
something else: some weakness or corruption in themselves or others. In The Great Gatsby, for example, Gatsby's
dreams are noble, even incorruptible; but as Nick Carraway says, it is “what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust
floated in the wake of his dreams” (Fitzgerald, 1951, p. 6) that destroys him: his own purity about the differences
between the new and old wealth, and the solidity and negligence of the Buchanans.
In Tender is the Night Dick Diver's pursuit of the American Dream of success and fulfillment is defeated by
weakness in himself, and in his final unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald develops a
protagonist who has achieved the American Dream of success and fulfillment and then makes explicit both the
imaginative and historical validity of his twenty-year investigation of the American Dream.
In 1940 Fitzgerald wrote in a letter to his daughter: “Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of
defeat ... the redeeming things are not 'happiness and pleasure' but the deeper satisfactions that come out of
struggle.” (Assadi, 2006, p. 54) This short sentence sums up Fitzgerald’s point about the American Dream.
More than any other author of his era, with the probable exception of Theodore Dreiser, Fitzgerald was conscious
about the influence of money on American life and character. As he wrote solemnly about money, ambition, and
love, which were generally undividable in his work, he has been labeled a materialist by his critics. He has been
considered as an uncritical venerator of the wealthy, a view disseminated by Ernest Hemingway at 1936. It will be
of conspicuous importance to see what was in money that a resourceful man of Fitzgerald’s personality and
mentality was so earnestly after.
Fitzgerald wrote about the rich, but his understanding of the effects of money on character was complex. His works
reflect his ambivalence of attitude: his attraction to and his distrust of the rich. For Fitzgerald, money was an
important part of the American Dream because it provided not just luxuries but also opportunities unavailable to
less affluent people. Money therefore had its obligation. As once Fitzgerald told Hemingway in his 16 July, 1936
letter of reply to The Snows of Kilimanjaro: “Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest
charm or distinction.” (Fitzgerald, 1994, p. 302) Wealthy people who wasted or perverted the opportunities that
their money gave them were objects of Fitzgerald's disappointment or disapproval.
In The Beautiful and Damned Anthony Patch's expectations of an inheritance cause him to waste his talents and
life. In The Great Gatsby “the Buchanan's money makes them careless, hard and directionless.” (Fitzgerald, 1951,
p. 10) In Tender is the Night “Dick Diver has been swallowed up like a gigolo, and somehow permitted his arsenal
to be locked up in the warren safety-deposit vaults.” (Fitzgerald, 1996, p. 209) Fitzgerald clearly understood that
money had the power to corrupt its possessors, just as it had the potential to increase their fulfillment.
Fitzgerald's reaction to money was wrought by his family's vague social status in St. Paul and by his contact to the
sons and daughters of the wealthy at prep school and Princeton. In a 4 March, 1938 letter to Anne Ober about
Scottie Fitzgerald's forthcoming private-school graduation ceremony, Fitzgerald wrote: “… we will watch all the
other little girls get diamond bracelets and Cord roadsters. I am going to costumers in New York and buy Scotty
some phony jewelry so she can pretend they are graduations presents. Otherwise, she will have to suffer the shame
of being a poor girl in a rich girl's school that was always my experience- a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in
a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton. So I guess she can stand it. However, I have never
been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.” (Fitzgerald, 1972, p. 357)
Fitzgerald's sense of being excluded from the freedom and opportunities provided by money had been further
intensified by his inability to marry Zelda right away because of his failures in New York following his army
discharge. Because Fitzgerald's response to wealth was complex, mixing resentment and strong attraction, his
fictional treatment of his material is both profound and extensive. Beside, Fitzgerald with his great sense of pattern
was trying to find a way through which he could impose order on the chaotic world he was living in. Therefore, he
might have assumed in the safe and proud world of the rich above the hot struggles of the poor he could get what
he had always been seeking.

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Fitzgerald employed a financial metaphor, Emotional Bankruptcy, to label a theme that pervades his work. He
believed that people have a fixed amount of emotional capital and that when his capital is depleted by reckless
expenditure, it cannot be replaced. Fitzgerald developed this idea from his own struggles with money, personal
relationship, and internal and external impediments to his work. During the 1930s he confided in his notebooks, “I
have asked a lot of my emotions- one hundred and twenty stories, the price was high, right up with Kipling,
because there was one little drop of something not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these,
in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it is gone and I am just like you now.” (Fitzgerald, 1993, p. 92)
In The Crack-Up he described his sense of Emotional Bankruptcy through financial metaphors, declaring that “like
a man over-drawing at his bank, he felt a vast irresponsibility toward every obligation, a deflation of all my values”
(Fitzgerald, 1993, pp. 77-78) In his statement he suggested that both he and his countrymen, engaged in quests for
the quintessential American Dream of success, wealth, and happiness, must almost inevitably exhaust their
energies and resources.
Most significantly, Dick Diver, having given too much to too many people, fades from once-brilliant psychiatrist
to failed small-town doctor in Tender is the Night. The final sentences of the novel is a much-admired example of
Fitzgerald's perfectly controlled tone and rhythm as he conveys Diver's Emotional Bankruptcy and obscurity:
“perhaps, so she [Nicole Diver] liked to think, his career was biding its time, again like Grant's in Galena; his latest
note was post-marked from Hornell, New York, which is some distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any
case he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another.”(Fitzgerald, 1996, p. 321)
3.2 Techniques and Style
Another interesting issue that should be presented in the research is Fitzgerald's unique technique and style. The
importance of including Fitzgerald in American Literature anthologies cannot be overestimated. Fitzgerald said of
himself in a letter to his editor Maxwell Perkins, “in a small way I was an original.” (Kuehl & Breyer, 1991, p.
261). This remark opens the way for comparison to other writers. Fitzgerald's style is completely his own and
perhaps the most incomparable aspect of his prose. It is neither so subtly different that it takes perfect pitch to
identify nor so eccentric as to be self-consciously sui generis, like the writing styles of Ernest Hemingway or
William Faulkner. The central thematic concerns of Fitzgerald were those of his time and of his country. With
literary Modernism, Fitzgerald's work has little in common.
With the book of This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald became known as a daring writer primarily because of his
material and themes rather than because of his technical innovations. His questing young men and courageous
young women, who challenged conventional standards of behavior, seemed emblematic of the new decade of the
1920s, thereby attracting youthful readers and unsettling many older ones. Fitzgerald, however, was not essentially
a modernist or an experimental writer, as were many of his contemporaries. Except, for a brief passages in This
Side of Paradise and Tender is The Night, he avoided the stream of consciousness technique perfected by British
Writers James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Fitzgerald also rejected what he called the “infectious style” (Fitzgerald,
1993, p. 79) with its short declarative sentences and simple diction of Ernest Hemingway.
He tried to find the visible act that revealed a moral quality inherent in a certain moment of time. “He was haunted
by time, as if he wrote in a room full of clocks and calendars. He said in an otherwise undistinguished magazine
story, any given moment has its value; it can be questioned in the light of after-events, but the moment remains.”
(Cowley, 1951, pp. xiii-xiv).
Fitzgerald's techniques and writing style were traditional because his vision of the world was at least in part drawn
from pre-World War I assumption. Lionel Trilling correctly observed that “Fitzgerald was perhaps the last notable
writer to affirm the Romantic fantasy, descended from the Renaissance, of personal ambition and heroism, of life
committed to, or thrown away for, some ideal of self.” (Trilling, 1950, p. 249) Whereas Hemingway's and Dos
Passos's male protagonists often express their disillusionment with “all faiths”, Fitzgerald's best male figures
adhere to these faiths, though they may question them and may be defeated in their quests. He asserted his
allegiance to the older, 19th-century tradition: “I am the last of the novelists for a long time now.” (Tate, 2007, p.
140).
Fitzgerald was above all, a story teller who achieved a close relationship with the reader through the voice of his
fiction, which was intimate, warm, and witty. Trilling defined this quality as his power of love: “… There is a tone
and pitch to the sentences which suggest his warmth and tenderness, and, what is rare nowadays and not likely to
be admired, his gentleness without softness … He was gifted with the satiric eye; yet we feel that in his morality he
was more drawn to celebrate the good than to denounce the bad … we perceive that he loved the good not only
with his mind but also with his quick senses and his youthful pride and desire.” (Trilling, 1950, pp. 244-245).

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Raymond Chandler made a similar point about Fitzgerald's distinctive voice: “He had one of the rarest qualities in
all literature… the word is as charm as Keats would have used it. It is not a matter of pretty writing or clear style.
It's a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite, the sort of thing you get from good string quartettes. Yes,
where would you find it today?” (Chandler, 1981, p. 239).
Most practitioners of American social fiction tend to saturate their texts with the details of character and place, but
Fitzgerald in his mature work employed a different method. Critics have observed that in This Side of Paradise
Fitzgerald employed the saturation method, mixing a variety of styles and forms—verse and short plays, for
example, are included within his narrative—as well as at least two sometimes inconsistent points of view. The
reviewer for the New Republic described the novel as “the collected works of F. Scott Fitzgerald.” (Fitzgerald,
1978, p. 22) The Beautiful and Damned is more tightly constructed than This Side of Paradise, though it still
suffers from inconsistent style and tone, authorial intrusions, and awkwardly interpolated material from other
genres. With The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald truly became the novelist of selection, disciplining his wealth of literary
sources and his fertile imagination. He uses carefully selected details of description to convey through each object
the character and vision of its owner. For example, the most famous automobile in American literature, Gatsby's
yellow car, is not defined as a Rolls-Royce or a Duisenberg but is instead labeled by Tom Buchanan as a “circus
wagon” (Fitzgerald, 1978, p. 22) and described by Nick Caraway as “a rich cream color, bright with nickel,
swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hatboxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a
labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns.” (Fitzgerald, 1978, p. 68) With these descriptions Fitzgerald
conveys “Gatsby's gorgeous, grandiose platonic conception of himself in service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious
beauty.” (Fitzgerald, 1978, p. 104)
Throughout his works Fitzgerald's writing style is impressionistic and his details evoke sensory responses in the
reader. In the description of Nicole Diver's shopping trip in Book one, chapter 12 of Tender is the Night, permit
omniscient-narrator response: “… she bought colored beads, failure beach cushions, artificial flowers, honey, a
guest bed, scarves, love birds, miniatures for a doll's house and three yards of some new cloth the color of
prawns …, two chamois leather jackets of kingfisher blue and burnings bush from Hermes—bought all these
things not a bit like a high-class courtesan buying underwear and jewels, which were after all professional
equipment and insurance- but with an entirely different point of view. Nicole was the product of much ingenuity
and toil. For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the around belly of the continent to
California; … men mixed toothpaste in vast and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes
quickly in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; …these were some of the people who
gave a tithe to Nicole, and as the whole system swayed and thundered onward it lent a feverish bloom to such
processes of hers as wholesale buying.” (Fitzgerald, 1978, p. 59) Here Fitzgerald astonishes the reader with the
variety and luxury of Nicole's purchases, then suggest the price that her extravagant needs exact both upon poorer
people everywhere and upon herself and in a final imaginative leap, concedes her exciting feverish bloom and
grace as she fulfills her privileges as a wealthy woman.
In other places Fitzgerald's style evokes mood. At the beginning of chapter 3 of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway
begins his first description of a Gatsby party with these lines: “There was music from my neighbor's house through
the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the
champagne and the stars.” (Fitzgerald, 1951, p. 43). The language and rhythm of these sentences establish a
romantic scene. Fitzgerald, through his narrator Nick, employs language that subtly suggests both the magic and
corruption that fill the world of the novel.
Many literary critics have attempted to identify distinctive elements of Fitzgerald's style. They have focused on his
dramatic use of verbs—Wilson's car that crouched in a dim corner—or his pattern of linking adjectives that seem
contradictory: “Nicole Diver's hard and lovely and pitiful face.” (Fitzgerald, 1978, p. 10). Critics have also cited
his linkage of apparently incompatible nouns and adjectives to produce startling but thematically evocative effects:
the triumphant hatboxes of Gatsby's car and the blue garden of his parties, both suggesting the grandeur but
unreality of his vision of self.
Commentators have given much attention to symbolism in Fitzgerald's novels and short fiction, particularly to his
expansion of color imagery into large symbolic patterns, his persistent drawing upon figures and episodes from
American history, and above all, his pervasive concern with time and mutability, or inevitable change. “In The
Great Gatsby there are at least 450 words that have to do with time, and in Tender is the Night, 840 words. In May
Day Fitzgerald examines the failure of virtually all social classes in the United State to fulfill the promises of the
American Dream and at the end of the story he uses symbolism to convey his message.” (Anne, 1971, pp. 333-339).
Through his symbolism Fitzgerald subtly but profoundly suggests how far the modern Americans of the story have
fallen from the New World dreams.

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A single example from The Great Gatsby—a novel filled with evocative symbols—illustrates Fitzgerald's skill in
handling this device. The green light at the end of Daisy's dock becomes an emblem of Gatsby's devotion to her
and to the dream that she personifies for him. The green light becomes symbolic not only of Gatsby's dreams but
also of the elusive American Dream that all readers presumably share.
Fitzgerald has been particularly praised for his handling of point of view and structure, especially in The Great
Gatsby. His adaption of a partially involved narrator for the novel—a technique that he probably learned from
reading British fiction writer Joseph Conrad—allowed Fitzgerald both to bring structural complexity to the novel
and to increase readers' belief in and sympathy for his title character. Nick, who tells Gatsby's story, declares at the
beginning of the novel that he is “inclined to reserve all judgments,” (Fitzgerald, 1951, p. 5) but as he is drawn in to
relationship with the characters, this intelligent, observant, and essentially moral man is forced to judge the
conduct of these characters.
Fitzgerald intended to employ a similar partially involved narrator, Cecelia Brady, in The Love of the Last Tycoon,
but because the unfinished novel is fragmentary and Fitzgerald's notes and outlines for the complete work are
unclear about Cecelia's role, it is impossible to say whether she would have been the only narrator of Love of the
Last Tycoon. In Tender is the Night, however, Fitzgerald abandoned the first-person narrator and developed
instead another complex structural plan.
Fitzgerald was clearly a master of stylistic and technical devices that are often identified with great writing. Arthur
James Thurber recognized an effect of this mastery when he wrote in 1942, “Fitzgerald's perfection of style and
form, as in The Great Gatsby, has a way of making something that lies between your stomach and your heart
quiver a little.” (Thurber, 1942, pp. 380-382). Gertrude Stein declared in 1933 that Fitzgerald was “the only one of
the younger writers who wrote naturally in sentences,” (Stein, 1933, p. 268). She could have added that he
combined his sentences into fully developed, integrated paragraphs. But Fitzgerald was more than a brilliant
technician and stylist. In an October 1936 letter to his daughter, who was trying to write short stories, Fitzgerald
offered advice drawn from his own experience: “If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever
said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found
it before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter-as indissolubly as if they
were conceived together.” (Fitzgerald, 1994, p. 313). So it could be said that Fitzgerald's accomplishments as a
fiction writer were, finally, the product of his remarkable fusion of technique and style with material, theme, and a
distinctive personal voice.
To sum up, the principal themes of Fitzgerald's works derive from the assertion of pressure when one thought
(generally embodied in a character) conquests over the other. The general subjects, Fitzgerald deals in all his
stories are: youth, physical prettiness, prosperity, and potential or romantic readiness—all of which are ideals to
him. Set against these subjects are their polar opposites: age, unattractiveness, poverty, and misspent potential.
Such conflict and resulting tension is, certainly, the material of which all fiction is made. With Fitzgerald's heroes,
nevertheless, partially due to the themes which he deals with and partially because of his professional handling of
the view point and occasionally the multiple viewpoints as using a logical addition of the narrator-observer, he
tries to carry objectivity even further than he does in his novels. The choices are seldom as obvious or as precise to
the major characters at the time as they may be to a separate observer, or as they may appear in retrospect to have
been. It is Fitzgerald's major gift that he can draw the reader into a mesh of emotional connection to a character,
while concomitantly permitting him to scrutinize the complexity of the mesh. That is what Fitzgerald's double
vision at its best is eventually about.
Fitzgerald was improving his preceding concerns from as far back as into the current. Only probably in his
achieving the historical prophecy does Fitzgerald go beyond his past concerns. Some of his works deal with the
moral corruption of society on a global stage, and some reveal that the writer is a novelist who has attained
philosophical view and technical skill and has added them onto the presenting establishment of his craftsmanship.
4. Conclusion
F. Scott Fitzgerald, like other late 19th century Realist writers, tried to show the diverse manners, classes, and
stratification of life in America and he created this picture by combining a broad variety of details derived from
surveillance and documentation to approach the norm of his experience. Along with this technique, he compared
the objective or absolute existence in America to that of the universal truths, or observed facts of life. As a result,
the Realistic elements are apparent in all his works. Fitzgerald directed the modernistic renaissance by using
realistic and naturalistic techniques. He is considered as a romantic writer, but he combined these qualities with
Realism, meaning precision of observation and characterization. Moreover, what is noteworthy about this author is

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the influence of European Existentialisms on his canon of works and the depth of the cultural moments he capture
in his art.
All the way through his literary life, Fitzgerald was often regarded as a not-quite-serious literary figure. This
assessment was fueled by his image as a free-spending, heavy-drinking playboy and by the material he frequently
exploited and became famous for rather than because of his technical innovations: the pursuit of wealth, success,
and happiness by ambitious poor boys; the romantic interests of young people; the concerns of affluent,
upper-middle-class men and women. He provided memorable portraits of the other kinds of people who manifest
recognizably Fitzgeraldian qualities as well. His central characters undertake processes of self-assessment, or they
judge others, or they are judged by Fitzgerald himself. Many of his most complex female characters are
incompetent of sharing the arrogant dreams and aspirations of the men who love them. One of the best and the
most familiar personifications of double vision in Fitzgerald's work is Nick Carraway, who either participates in
and comments on the action of the novel.
For Fitzgerald the American Dream was bound up inevitably with the country's history. He wrote about the rich,
but his perception of the influence of money on character was complex. His works reflect his appeal to and his
mistrust of the rich. Fitzgerald used a fiscal metaphor, Emotional Bankruptcy to label a theme that permeates his
work. Fitzgerald expanded this idea from his individual struggles with money, personal affiliation, and internal
and external obstructions to his work. To sum up, the foremost themes of Fitzgerald's novels derive from the
declaration of tension when one idea (usually personified in a character) triumphs over another. The main
denominators are the topics with which Fitzgerald deals with in all of his novels: youth, bodily attractiveness,
wealth, and potential or romantic willingness—all of which are ideals to Fitzgerald. Next to these subjects are their
polar opposites: wasted potential, poverty, ugliness, age. Such conflict and consequential tension is, certainly, the
stuff of which all fiction is made.
Symbolism in Fitzgerald's novels and short fiction is given much attention to. Fitzgerald in his mature work
employed the Saturation method, mixing a diversity of styles and forms With The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald
truthfully became the novelist of selection, disciplining his wealth of literary sources and his creative imagination.
His writing style is impressionistic and his details evoke sensory responses in the reader.
He, nevertheless, was not in essence a modernist or an experimental writer, as were many of his contemporaries.
Fitzgerald's techniques and writing style were traditional because his vision of the world was at least in part drawn
from pre-World War I assumption. He was beyond all, a story teller who achieved a close relationship with the
reader by the voice of his fiction, which was warm, intimate, and witty.
Fitzgerald has been mostly praised for his handling of point of view and structure, particularly in The Great Gatsby.
In the first half of the 20th century, Fitzgerald became the most famous American writer in the world. His unique
style differs distinctively from that of writers before him, and his work helped shape both the British and American
literature that followed it. He was the self-styled spokesman of the Lost Generation, clearly a master of stylistic
and technical devices that are often identified with great writing. All in all, Fitzgerald's style is utterly his own and
perhaps the most unique aspect of his prose. Many writers have acknowledged their respect of his style, but no
writer has productively imitated him. He was undoubtedly a master of stylistic and technical devices that are often
identified with great writing.
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