The Great Gatsby Memes, Explained

Leonardo DiCaprio in a white dinner jacket, lifting a champagne flute with a closed-mouth smile and a slow knowing nod, against a background of pink and gold fireworks. The frame is from Baz Luhrmann's 2013 film adaptation. In the novel, the toast moment is woven into Chapter 7, the long, hot afternoon when everything begins to collapse.

“Her voice is full of money.”Jay Gatsby, Chapter 7, The Great Gatsby

Today the image is shorthand for "I succeeded", "congrats to me", or self-deprecating triumph: posted after a small win, a passed exam, a paid invoice. The smirk reads as confident.

In the novel, the same beat is one of Gatsby's most exposing moments. Daisy has just told Nick she finds Gatsby cool. Gatsby cannot help himself and names the truth out loud: what he actually loves about Daisy is not her, it is the inherited wealth that gives her voice that careless musical lilt. He praises her by naming the price tag. Fitzgerald uses the line to show that Gatsby's romance was always also a class fantasy. The toast in the film is the silent visual of that moment: a man celebrating something he has been chasing for five years, in the language of the world he wants to be let into.

Gatsby standing alone on the lawn of his West Egg mansion at night, arm outstretched toward a single green light across the bay. The image is iconic in both the 1974 Robert Redford film and the 2013 Luhrmann film, and is by far the most-tattooed image from any American novel.

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter, tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.”Nick Carraway, Chapter 9, The Great Gatsby

Used as a symbol of hope, ambition, manifestation, vision-boards, "keep going", New Year's posts. People share it with captions like "chasing the green light" meaning their dream.

Fitzgerald's green light is one of the saddest symbols in American literature, not one of the most hopeful. Read the sentence: the future recedes year by year. The arms reach out farther because the thing is always further away. Gatsby's whole project was an attempt to outrun something that, by definition, moves with you. Fitzgerald is not saying "keep reaching"; he is saying "the country runs on an engine that cannot be satisfied". The image looks aspirational and means the opposite.

A still or fan-graphic of Gatsby in a pink three-piece suit, eyes wide, saying the line with exclamation marks. Shared as plain text, as Twitter screenshot, as graphic with the words overlaid on a sunset photograph. From Chapter 6, when Nick gently suggests to Gatsby that Daisy may not still be available to him after five years.

“Can't repeat the past? Why of course you can!”Jay Gatsby, Chapter 6, The Great Gatsby

Used as motivation: "believe in yourself", "never give up", "second chances". Often paired with a story of someone returning to a project, a relationship, a city.

Anyone who has loved another person from a distance for five years knows the line is wrong. Fitzgerald gives the wrongness to Gatsby in three sentences so the rest of the novel can take it apart. The line is famous because of the exclamation marks: a grown man insisting on the impossible, with the energy of someone who already half knows it. The rest of the book is a long, careful study of what happens when you treat insistence as a substitute for evidence. The line is not a motto; it is the diagnosis.

Across both the 1974 and 2013 films, Gatsby calls almost every man "old sport" with deliberate British-accent overcorrection. DiCaprio in particular delivers it twenty-eight times in the film. TikTok and Twitter have made it a recurring joke: people insert "old sport" into mundane sentences to sound vaguely 1920s.

“Look here, old sport, what's your opinion of me, anyhow?”Jay Gatsby, Chapter 4, The Great Gatsby

Used to playact wealth, to sound charming in a self-aware way, or as ironic flourish when someone is being pretentious. "Pass the salt, old sport." "Off to my meeting, old sport."

Old sport in Fitzgerald's novel is not casual upper-class slang. It is Gatsby's tell. The phrase came into English from American upper-class clubs in the 1900s, and Gatsby has clearly memorised it as the way a Yale man speaks. Real Yale men in the novel (Tom Buchanan) never say it. The tic is a class signal that gives Gatsby away every time he uses it: a man pretending to be something he learned out of a book. The internet's love of the phrase is, fittingly, exactly the kind of class cosplay Fitzgerald put it in to mock.