Language

• The Great Gatsby is written in a wry, sophisticated, and elegiac style with a lot of metaphors, figurative imagery, and poetic language that establish a sense of nostalgia and loss
• those metaphors and imageries highly characterize the novel
  
  • Gatsby‘s party is described by Nick as the following: "The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light."
  • descriptive sentences help the reader imagine the scene (Chapter 2, page 27)
  • the use of words of continual movement ("wanderers"; "sea-change") implies that Gatsby‘s visitors are used to moving effortlessly and indifferently through life
• rhetorical devices are used to establish the story‘s evocative mood
  
  • Nick‘s restlessness, his rejection of as well as his fascination with New York City are illustrated by a list of contrasts ("Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life." - Chapter 3, page 24)
  • stylized, poetical observations of everyday life (a woman who appears "like an angry diamond" (Chapter 3, page 34) or the city "rising up out of the river in white heaps and sugar lumps" (Chapter 3, page 44))
• variations in language show divisions in social class: the Wilsons express themselves in vernacular speech ("I just got wised up to something funny... that’s why I been bothering you about the car" - Chapter 7, page 79)
• irony, exaggeration, and ridicule are used to mock hypocritical social types ("I‘m p-paralyzed with happiness.": reaction of Daisy when she meets Nick for the first time as an overstatement - Chapter 1, page 8)
• frequent use of the words "time" and "past" emphasize the importance of remembrance and recollection
• Fitzgerald favours the poetic capacities of his text and also juxtaposing elevated, metaphorical language with the rough voices and brutish nature of his characters

Genre

• Tragedy
  
  • the protagonist is a larger-than-life hero whose pursuit of an impossible goal blinds him to reality, finally leading to his brutal death
  • Gatsby‘s tragic flaw: his reluctance of letting go of the past; his will to even commit crimes in order to attain his dream (becoming a bootlegger, being in touch with gangsters, reinventing himself); his unwillingness to accept the fact that Daisy will not leave Tom for him
  • Gatsby‘s romantic hopefulness can be considered a flaw since it results in him taking the blame for Myrtle‘s death even though he knows that he is writing his own death sentence due to that
• Realism
  
  • geographically precise settings: The Plaza Hotel, Central Park and Pennsylvania Station in NYC, East and West Egg as fictionalized versions of the real towns of East and West Hampton)
  • specific time and place: references to the First World War, the World Series and Prohibition
  • portrayal of the social order: contrast between Gatsby‘s lavish parties and the destitute and hopeless families in the Valley of Ashes
  • depiction of the real life including brutally honest acknowledgements of sex, adultery and divorce
• Modernism
  
  • references to technological "new" inventions such as ocean-going ships, trains, automobiles
  • increasing automation of everyday life is still rather scary for the people of the beginning of the 20^th century ("a machine which could extract the juice ... of two hundred oranges ... if a little button was pressed two hundred times" - Chapter 3, page 26)
  • urban landscapes connected to a feeling of loneliness ("the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye" - (Chapter 3, page 37); "white chasms" in the city)
• Social Satire
  
  • minor characters are used to express the mindless excess and superficiality of the Jazz Age
  • capitalism is satirized with the comparison of the man selling puppies with John D. Rockefeller (self-importance of the American upper class is mocked by comparing a member of it - a tycoon in fact - with a street vendor)
  • solemn tone at the end of the novel contrasts with the lighter, more satiric tone at the beginning of it