Through Nick's stream of unconsciousness in the following lines: "Yet high above the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed its share of human secrecy to the observer casual in the dark streets, and I was him too, I looked up and wondered. as he cannot identify himself outside the world. others. Nick continues this idea by saying that he "sometimes felt a disturbing loneliness, and he felt it in others." This sentence shows how Nick justifies his lifestyle as it suggests that others have it too. However, at the end of the novel Nick realizes that not only is he alone but he is empty as he knows more about the drama surrounding him than himself the hotel scene when Tom and Gatsby are wishing, and Nick makes the little comment to himself himself, who “just remembered that on [his] birthday today [he] was thirty. Before [him] lay the portentous and menacing road of a new decade." Yet, he had nothing to show for it, as his social life was filled with other people's secrets and his potential romance, something that Nick dreams deeply, vanishing at the end of the novel when Jordan leaves.