This year, instead of making my high school sophomores take the test on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, I gave them the option to produce a podcast. Some of my more reticent students suddenly had a lot to say. In one of the podcasts done by a group of four girls, Gabby R. referenced Fergie’s song “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody,” featured in the 2013 film version of Gatsby, to highlight the Roaring Twenties party scene. Gabby was struck by the number of parties throughout the novel—big and small—and suggested that the partying was ultimately responsible (spoiler alert) for the three bloody corpses, one of which is floating in the pool, at the end of the book.

In this 1925 novel, Fitzgerald has a lot to say about modern social life: He signals that the illusion of glamour often masks an emptiness below the surface. Young people embarking on college life, replete with parties and pleasure-seeking, can surely learn something from this aspect of the story.

That said, the glittering party scenes may be what initially attracts young people to the story. But once drawn in, the reader—along with the narrator—slowly realizes that the fireworks fade to smoke and the sparkling glasses of champagne fizzle and harden into a splitting headache the next day.

Initially, both the reader and the narrator, Nick Carraway, are mesmerized by the thrill of New York life. Nick hails from the Midwest and arrives in New York for a job. He rents a bungalow in “West Egg.” His cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband, Tom, live in “East Egg” in an old-money mansion, where the Long Island Sound breeze blows the curtains across the sitting room, “twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling … over the wine-colored rug.” Nick is entranced by Daisy’s alluring voice and is intrigued by his mysterious neighbor, Jay Gatsby, who hosts the most popular parties in town. Yet he also feels “within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

Like Nick, Fitzgerald evidently regarded the fast-paced celebrity lifestyle of 1920s America as vacuous and unfulfilling. Moreover, in his novel, he predicted the 21^st-century world of “shorts” and faster instant gratification. Upon arriving in New York in the early summer of 1922, Nick Carraway, like Fitzgerald, imbibes the “racy and adventurous” feel of city life, especially “the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines give to the restless eye.” Yet, also like Fitzgerald, experiences “a haunting loneliness … and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner … wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.” Is Fitzgerald thinking only of young clerks? 

Obviously, the parallels to today are striking. Young people now see “shorts” flicker across their phone and computer screens all day long. They are left thinking that the lifestyle of the rich and famous is ideal and that a simple, honest life can only disappoint. For many young adults, happiness now means hedonism or the appearance of fun on social media. It is measured by how many parties they attend, how often they post about them, and how fashionable their clothes appear. Life becomes an exhibit and moves quickly, just as it does for the partygoers in Gatsby.

In each of the first three chapters of the novel, Nick attends a party: (1) an intimate dinner soiree at Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s estate in the East Egg, (2) a small but cramped apartment party in Manhattan, and (3) a full-scale “rager” at Gatsby’s. At the onset of the story, Nick feels honored to be invited to his cousin Daisy’s for dinner and even meets her friend, a celebrity golfer named Jordan Baker. However, despite the intimate setting—complete with candlelight and roses—Nick feels awkward as his cousin’s husband, Tom, propels him from room to room “like a piece on a checkerboard” and abruptly answers the phone during dinner to speak with his mistress. Over the course of the evening, the capricious Daisy swings from inane gossip to treating Nick as her sole confidant. She even tells him about the time she felt “utterly abandoned” after giving birth to her daughter. The Buchanans’ French widows, pristine stables, and celebrity marriage are merely a front for the discordant world within. By the end of the night, Nick feels unsettled. However, upon returning home, he becomes preoccupied by the figure standing a stone’s throw from his cottage—reaching out toward the green light coming from Daisy’s dock across the Sound—Gatsby.  

Party two is thrown together impulsively by Tom after he brings Nick to meet his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, at the “Valley of Ashes”—a literal dump marking the halfway point between Long Island and the city. Myrtle lives there with her husband, George, who owns a gas station and buys used cars. Tom visits under the pretense of having a car for Wilson to purchase, then takes Nick and Myrtle back to his apartment in the city. There, the afternoon spirals from bad to worse as Nick grows increasingly drunk. He recounts the episode like a fly on the wall, first as the couple disappears into the bedroom and then as he listens to the coarse chatter of Myrtle’s acquaintances, who materialize amid the growing debauchery. As Myrtle changes her outfit one too many times, Nick’s perspective grows hazy, and he is jolted back to reality only when she begins screaming Daisy’s name—after which Tom breaks her nose, splattering blood across the tapestried wall. The third party, which is at Gatsby’s behemoth dwelling in the West Egg, culminates in an assembly of drunk men and women—jealous husbands and wives trying to extract their partners from the chaos, and a crashed car next to which stands an inebriated man in thick glasses who endeavors to determine why the steering wheel has come off.

As an addendum to the first three parties he attends, Nick begins Chapter 4 by casually mentioning, in a Homeric catalogue, all the Gatsby partygoers he can remember from the summer of 1922. He recalls that many of them later get divorced or run over by cars, and one, Henry L. Palmetto, “killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.” Obviously, the parties of their youth do not satiate them in their adulthood.

Away from home for the first time, a young adult must be a sturdy individual to withstand the party culture on or near most college campuses. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, approximately 1,519 U.S. college students aged 18-24 die of alcohol-related accidents per year, and 696,000 are assaulted by people under the influence of alcohol. Additionally, various studies show that 70-80 percent of students who were raised with faith lose it in college, as a self-sacrificial, faith-based lifestyle is not compatible with what our relativistic culture preaches. Exactly 100 years later, this culture simply mirrors the one Fitzgerald portrayed.

On a brighter note, many recent news reports confirm that a surge of adults in their 20s and 30s are turning to faith because of the lack of moral structure in secular society. For a report in the National Catholic Register, Fr. Will Straten, pastor at St. Mary’s Catholic Center at Texas A&M, commented on the college’s 51 student-converts this past Easter: “The students who aren’t Catholic are hungry and are looking for something … They’re looking for something that’s grounded and seems to make sense.” The Register also reported the record-breaking numbers of adult converts across many dioceses. Furthermore, Madeleine Kearns, in an article for the Free Press, emphasizes that young adults are seeking tradition, especially in “an age of instability.”

In the final pages of the novel, Nick Carraway is left with the dregs of the party. Myrtle has been run over by a “bad driver” and left to die in the dust. The Buchanans have fled town to avoid scandal, and Gatsby has been shot dead in the pool. Nick does not quite know what to do, but he wishes the world would come to some sort of “moral attention”—the glitter and sparkle having been only an illusion, and the seductive green light merely a light on a dock.

Hopefully, like Nick, more young adults in our current “Roaring 20’s” will have similar epiphanies amid societal decadence and superficiality. Or, better yet, they will recognize the elusive façade for what it really is, before it destroys their lives.