Wilde begins “The Remarkable Rocket” with a flowery, fairty-tale-esque writing style—describing the Prince as having “dreamy violet eyes” with hair “like fine gold”—before quickly shifting into a much more conversational and informal style. The shift occurs as Wilde moves away from focusing on the human characters of the Court and towards a group of anthropomorphized fireworks that are to be set off during the Prince’s wedding. After the appearance of the fireworks, the story becomes almost entirely dialogue between the fireworks themselves or between the Rocket firework and the animals he meets after being tossed from the Court. Because of the dialogue-heavy nature of the story, Wilde’s writing style becomes much more conversational, with characters speaking to each other in everyday language.
Another important element of Wilde's style in the story is the fact that, when one of his more arrogant characters (the Rocket, the King, or the Frog) makes a false or overly egotistical claim, he will have the narrator immediately undercut said claim. Take the following passage, for example, which comes as the Rocket finally alights after two boys mistake him for a twig and add him to their fire:
“Now I am going to explode,” he cried. “I shall set the whole world on fire, and make such a noise that nobody will talk about anything else for a whole year.” And he certainly did explode. Bang! Bang! Bang! went the gunpowder. There was no doubt about it.
But nobody heard him, not even the two little boys, for they were sound asleep.
Here, the narrator allows the Rocket to build up the majesty of his oncoming explosion—going as far as stating that “nobody will talk about anything else for a whole year”—before undermining the Rocket’s self-importance with the simple note, “But nobody heard him.” With this stylistic choice (which appears elsewhere in the story as well), Wilde encourages readers to question the Rocket’s self-importance and, therefore, the self-importance of similarly arrogant upper-class people in real life.
