Achieving The American Dream In The Great Gatsby

Loads of people in life have goals, but there is one main goal that everyone strives for, and that is to achieve the American Dream. Throughout the book, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, each person had an American Dream. One person in particular was Nick Carraway, in the book he shows love and passion towards moving East to live in West Egg, and wanting to obtain a steady job as a bond man. Despite him being surrounded by many different wealthy people, Nick was never able to achieve the American Dream of living a prosperous and happy life with a steady job, due to the chaotic drama he was dragged into right from the start of moving to West Egg. The first piece of evidence that shows Nick never achieved the American Dream is because he was dragged into loads of drama having to deal with love and relationships, “Her gray, sun-stained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her” (58). Nick was set on one thing when he moved East, and that was to be a bond man. Sadly he got caught up in love and it made it tough for him to reach his goals. Not only was Nick succumbed by drama, he was also distracted by the bad decisions and choices his new friends were making, “Daisy stepped on it. I tried to make her stop, but she couldn’t, so I …show more content…
I’m a bond man” (10) and after the relationships he had made were slowly dissipated and started growing weaker. Nick took it upon himself to make the tough decision to move back West, “That's my Middle West ... the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark.... I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life”