Through Nick's stream of unconsciousness in the following lines: "Yet above the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed its share of human secrecy to the casual observer in the dark streets, and I was there too, looking up and wondering. I was inside and out, both enchanted and repulsed by the variety. inexhaustible of life”, (p. ) the reader learns how Nick is completely lost because he cannot identify himself outside of the world Nick continues this idea by explaining how he “sometimes felt a haunting loneliness and. felt it in others'. This line shows how Nick justifies his lifestyle by suggesting that others do it too. However, at the end of the novel, Nick realizes that he is not only alone, but empty, for he knows more about the drama surrounding him than he does the scene in the hotel when Tom and Gatsby foreshadow, and Nick makes the little comment, that he "just remembered that [his] birthday was. 'today [he] was thirty years old Before [him] stretched the sinister and threatening path of a new one. decade." Yet he had nothing to show, as his social life was filled with other people's secrets and his only potential romance, something Nick dreams of deeply, disappears at the end of the novel as Jordan leaves.