Barbara Ehrenreich Nickel And Dimed Analysis

A hallmark of the American identity is the belief that all individuals have the ability to pursue and achieve their dreams, regardless of who they are or where they come from, so long as they share the unceasingly industrious spirit that is embedded in America. This widely-accepted ideal forms the framework of success for many individuals—with the exception being outliers. Coined as “the American Dream”, people associate this term with hard work, that anyone in the United States has an equal chance of achieving prosperity and success. In the personal narrative Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, author Barbara Ehrenreich tests the limits of poverty in an attempt to confirm the existence of the American Dream; however, her efforts
ended in vain. Despite the fact that she had all the privileges in the world, there were too many factors inhibiting her chances of success, ultimately suggesting that the notion behind the American Dream is unattainable in modern society.
During the unfolding of Nickel and Dimed, author Ehrenreich notes that she conducted her experiment with an ideal background. She states that, “this is in fact the best-case scenario: a person with every advantage that ethnicity and education, health and motivation can confer attempting, in a time of exuberant prosperity, to survive in the economy's lower depths” (Ehrenreich, 10). She established several guidelines which she would abide by throughout her experiment: she must take the highest paying job while doing her best to maintain her j