Being an American can mean a wide variety of things to different people. Some people think being an American is someone who is free, others think being an American can be a positive or a negative, but every individual has personal beliefs about what it means to be an American. Nick, the narrator of the book The Great Gatsby, describes Gatsby 's resourcefulness of movement as, “...so peculiarly American that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in your and, even more with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games” (64). Nick describes Gatsby as someone who does not work hard and further compares those aspects as American, therefore Nick’s perception of Americans is that they are not hard workers. While Nick seems to have a preconceived notion of what it means to be an American, the entire novel Portrays F. Scott Fitzgerald views on what it means to be an American in the changing time periods. F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the theme of the East and West as representations of a “New” America and an “Old” America. The characters in the novel represent different negative aspect of the “New” America, such as being corrupted from money, lust, greed, and deceit, revealing how Fitzgerald believes America is making a turn for the worst in the changing times of the 1920s.
The East and West Eggs are used as representations of New and Old America, in order to differentiate the inhabitants of both Eggs. Early on in the book, Fitzgerald describes West Egg