What Was Significant About Nick's 30th Birthday

Inof 's
novel , the main-- the Buchanans, , , and-- are atand 's home in East Egg,
the stifling heat exacerbating the tensions that already permeate the . The infidelities and
animosities that weave through and among the assembled are taking their toll, and it is clear
that nobody is particularly happy these days. The group decides to go into the city, where the
situation worsens. 

The atmosphere among the characters continues to sour,
until, tired of Tom's tirades, Gatsby finally blurts out that Daisy only married Tom because she
was tired of waiting for Gatsby to amass the wealth necessary to satisfy her longing for
financial security -- a definition of comfort that far exceeded any rational, middle class
concept of such. Tom rebuts Gatsby's assertion, shouting that he and Daisy love each other, and
that, while he may stray from time to time, he continues to love her, prompting Daisy to call
her husband "revolting."

Through it all, Nick silently observes,
only rarely commenting. Finally, a thought occurs to him:

I just remembered that today's my birthday.

"I was thirty.
Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a new decade."

Nick's comment that it is his birthday serves as a sudden reminder
to himself of his presence among these unhappy, rich people. Heretofore, in the course of the
chapter, Nick has served as the ubiquitous observer of others. Now, he is reaffirming his
existence, and that he has, consciously or not, sublimated is own identity to those in whose
world he has immersed himself since moving to Long Island. The thirtieth birthday is considered
a major milestone in many peoples' lives, marking, in a sense, the final transition from youth
to the sometimes brutal realities of adulthood. This milestone, however, crept up on
Fitzgerald's narrator. Nick has invested so much of his life in the travails and intrigues of
this mercurial group of people that he forgot his own thirtieth birthday. He has done so as the
lives of those around him continue their gradual but steady descent into the ennui that the
author has so studiously depicted in his novel. Not only has his birthday come and (almost)
gone, without his noticing, but the decade ahead, Nick notes ominously, will deprive the wealthy
in whose world he has entered of that which has distinguished them. The Great Depression lies
ahead, and it is in hindsight that Nick suggests his transition into adulthood, and the harsh
realities that portends, will not be much fun.