Although written before Trout Fishing in America, Confederate General from Big Sur is stylistically a much more conventional novel. The narrator Jesse, who says he likes to watch triple features at cheap theaters, fashions a montage of narrative images, but his loosely related series of anecdotes effectively define the character of Lee Mellon and advance a cohesive plot that largely adheres to chronological linearity.

As in Trout Fishing in America, the prose is sparse, composed of unemotionally observed details. This direct, matter-of-fact style emphasizes the novel's philosophical refusal to make value judgments in a world in which good and evil are simply part of a never-ending pattern beyond man's comprehension. There is no attempt to explain contradictions, for in Confederate General from Big Sur, unlike the conforming world which the novel rejects, consistency has no particular value.