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Religion In The Great Gatsby Essay

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In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, it appears that religion is all but absent, having no role in the lives of the characters. Instead of following a God, the people of East Egg live life on their own accord, detached from any outlined rules of ethics and morality. However, in reality God plays a key role in the character’s lives. This God, although not the traditional idea of divinity, is rather individual people and concepts that the characters worship as their own deity. Throughout the novel, the character’s piety is shaped by their own personal ideal of God that transcends the traditional boundaries of religion and ultimately corrupts them rather than offers them salvation. Traditional religion seems to be all but absent …show more content…

Gatsby’s own God-like spirit is compromised by his love of Daisy when he kisses her for the first time, which he does knowing that “his mind would never romp again like the mind of God (110),” but accepting that his life will not revolve around her. Gatsby accumulated mounds of possessions to please Daisy, but “in her actual and astounding presence, none of it was any longer real” (91). For Gatsby, Daisy’s presence is “astounding,” illustrating the grandiosity of the ideal he has built up for her. Nothing in Gatsby’s life in “real,” due to the fact that he distances himself from who Daisy truly is, choosing to see her as an ideal that can grant him salvation, rather than flawed human being. However, Daisy’s own inability to live up to this God-like position is what destroys Gatsby in the end. Gatsby is foolishly blinded by his need to worship Daisy, allowing him to be destroyed by her ideal while failing to build any kind of life without her. For Gatsby, Daisy’s final rejection of him made him demise completely, his death being in part due to the fact that he was not prepared or willing to see who she really

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