What Are Nick Carraway's Motives For The American Dream

How are all of these ideas connected? What is the specific argument about the dream?

Nick Carraway’s motives for what he acts upon reflect his wanting to live the ‘American Dream’. First, Nick has choices and rules that he makes for himself. Nick used to live in the Midwest and moved to New York where he lived in West Egg, Long Island. He moved because he needed a new place to help him achieve what he wants to achieve, to make money and live the American dream and be happy. When talking about his choice to move, Nick describes it, saying “when I came back from the East last Autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human

In addition to this, Nick is afraid of getting older and losing time in his life to achieve what he wants to be. After the big fight between Gatsby and Tom in the hotel room in New York, Nick realizes that it is his birthday. He goes on to say, “I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade,” (135) which displays his fear of becoming older. Nick fears this because he thinks he has not achieved the American dream yet and he feels as though he has less time to get to where he wants. The place that Nick wants to be in his life that he will qualify as his version of the American dream is to be where Gatsby is. He looks up to Gatsby and wants what he has, and feels that he is already losing time to get there. Nick fears that he will never get to where he wants to be and that he

Neither of the two had to work for their money or their lives, just because they are from a rich family. When the Buchanans are first mentioned in the book, Nick describes them as unbelievably rich. He says that Tom’s “ … family were enormously wealthy--...-- but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away; … it was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that,” (6). Nick is in awe of something like this, and what they did is almost the exact opposite of what George Wilson is trying to do. He has to work himself sick for extra money and Tom just packed up and moved because he wanted to, and no real reason at all. Due to the privileges that they have, Tom and Daisy take everything for granted and do not know how to appreciate what they are given. It is just in their nature to always have the luxuries that they have and would not know how to act if their lives suddenly changed and they no longer have what they do. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made,“(179) which make their lack of morals appear more than it ever has. The Buchanans use their wealth as a safety blanket and to cover up any wrong that they have made, leaving other