Perhaps no novel has captured the notion of the “American Dream” so powerfully as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s celebrated novel The Great Gatsby, which was published a century ago on April 10, 1925.  

Like all great literature, the work depicts the longings of the human heart in a manner that continues to speak to readers today and in a particular way to persons with an interest in religious themes, despite its author’s status as a lapsed Catholic. 

On the occasion of the book’s centennial, Father Brandon O’Brien, with the encouragement of Bishop John Barres of Rockville Centre, New York — the diocese where much of the novel takes place — has offered an insightful reflection on Gatsby from a historical, literary and theological perspective.  

While the novel’s New York setting during the “Roaring Twenties” reflects a world where religion seems absent, Father O’Brien shows how Fitzgerald’s childhood faith remained very much on the author’s mind as he wrote. Fitzgerald originally intended to include, as a prologue to the novel, a short story about a young boy who lies in the confessional and is warned about the seductiveness of worldly enjoyments.  

The enchantment of such earthly pleasures is a key theme from the beginning of the novel, in which readers are immersed in the extravagance of Long Island upper-crust social life. The recent college graduate Nick Carraway, the narrator of the story, pays a visit to his distant relative Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom at their majestic mansion overlooking a bay that feeds into Long Island Sound. Despite the splendid edifice with its garden and the forceful personalities of the couple — Nick observes of Daisy that “a stirring warmth flowed from her,” and Tom is a former star athlete whose body still retains “enormous power” — the magnificent appearances cannot hide the deep sense of sadness and emptiness that pervades the novel. In this manner, the text continually echoes key motifs of the modernist movement of which Fitzgerald formed a part.  

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” says Tom, as he voices one of his racist theories. This idea, expressed in such a shallow context — along with Tom’s brazen adulterous affair with Myrtle Wilson, the wife of a local auto mechanic — reflects his unsuccessful attempt to quell a deeper restlessness: “Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.”  

The reality of such gloominess doesn’t mean that the society depicted in The Great Gatsby lacks the power to mesmerize. The vivid narrative of upper-class social life, particularly in West Egg, home to the “new money,” is undoubtedly a key reason for the novel’s capacity to captivate readers. At the center of the novel are the grand parties thrown by Jay Gatsby, with their elaborate offerings of food and drink — “buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d’oeuvre,” “spiced baked hams” and the plentifully stocked bar — along with the fancy orchestra, “a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums,” accompanied by dancing and laughter. 

Yet behind the appearance of happiness promised by such festivities, all is not well. A recurring pattern in the novel is that indulgence soon leads to violence and destruction. Tom’s controlling attitude leads him to break the nose of his mistress during one moment of drunkenness, and as one of Gatsby’s parties wears on, Nick looks around and observes that “most of the remaining women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands.”   

Within such moments of intense social life, there is a surprising lack of authentic personal contact. Gatsby’s grand gatherings are attended by masses of people who were not invited, with “enthusiastic meetings” between people “who never knew each other’s names,” and the host remains aloof and mysterious to the crowd.  

However, Nick — Gatsby’s next-door neighbor — is one of the few invited guests, and he becomes an intimate witness to the longings of this enigmatic man. As we come to know, Gatsby is the assumed name of James Gatz, the son of “shiftless and unsuccessful farm people,” who seeks to erase his modest upbringing in the search of his own grand ideal, that of “a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.”  

Gatsby’s ambition finds its central object in Daisy, a much-sought-after and wealthy belle from Louisville, Kentucky, whom Gatsby comes to know while in military service.  

In a novel in which traditional religious practice seems forgotten, Daisy comes to take on a quasi-sacred quality for Gatsby, and with his first kiss his exalted vision of her receives its “incarnation.”   

Still, an immeasurable distance separates this ambitious man from the realization of his American dream. Gatsby is a “penniless young man without a past,” who comes to visit Daisy’s house only by a “colossal accident.” His courtship of Daisy is marked by illusion, first as a young soldier who tries to convey the pretense of being “from much the same strata as herself.”  

Upon coming to know of Gatsby’s overriding passion, which continues in spite of Daisy’s married status, Nick realizes that all his neighbor’s riches and lavish socializing have been aimed solely at winning over the object of his adoration. Gatsby has chosen to buy a house on West Egg solely so that he can be just across the bay from Daisy, and from where during the evenings he stares longingly at the green light at the end of the Buchanans’s dock. However close that dream might seem at one point, especially when, with Nick’s help, Gatsby is able to rekindle his relationship with Daisy, his ideal remains unattainable. Gatsby’s parties, for all their glitz, are appalling to the old-money, East Egg sensibility of Daisy.  

As Gatsby’s shady business dealings come to light, Daisy retreats from him into her own world, and he is left with only a “dead dream,” which “fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible …” 

In such a world, in which the quest for Daisy embodies the longing for a purely earthly happiness, which inevitably fails, the novel leaves hints of the transcendent. There is the “valley of ashes,” a dumping ground located between New York City and Long Island, which serves as a symbol for the novel’s broader sense of desolation and above which preside the giant godlike eyes of an oculist on a dilapidated billboard.  

Those eyes are a reminder of that same supernatural reality by which one character tries to comfort Tom’s auto mechanic over the death of his wife Myrtle, who is hit by Gatsby’s car while Daisy is at the wheel: “You ought to have a church, George, for times like this.” 

Sadly, at the novel’s conclusion, Nick seems incapable of opening his heart to this transcendent dimension. In his life, as in that of the other main characters, The Great Gatsby manifests — as Father O’Brien notes — the danger of that “desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience,” which Pope Francis has warned us of.  

Nonetheless, readers are left with a poignant insight into the restlessness of human desire, exemplified in Gatsby’s energetic striving after the green light. As Fitzgerald memorably concludes his great work: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”  

Yet in this same movement, we see the human heart’s need for something greater than all the wealth and glamor with which the modern world can try to satisfy it.