Until rereading The Great Gatsby this month, I never noticed all its references to the age of 30. Perhaps I’m just more sensitive to 30 because because I marked my third decade on Earth last December. Also, my good buddy Nate turned 30 last week.
In one moment, the book’s narrator Nick Carraway says, “I’m thirty. I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.” Carraway describes Gatsby this way: “I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.”
Gatsby seemingly celebrated his 30th birthday every night with a lavish party at his mansion in West Egg, Long Island. Not far from that fictional fishing village, Nate celebrated his 30th with a slightly more modest backyard party in Brooklyn, although no party feels modest when it includes a surprise mariachi band…
Here are other references in The Great Gatsby to 30:
For Tom Buchanan: He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward.
And for the frail Daisy: We had luncheon in the dining-room, darkened, too, against the heat, and drank down nervous gayety with the cold ale. “What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon,” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?” “Don’t be morbid,” Jordan said. “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” “But it’s so hot,” insisted Daisy, on the verge of tears, “And everything’s so confused.”
Thirty is a big birthday. It’s the last big one before for the next two decades, really, until 50. I initially marked my 30th in a somewhat depressed, melancholy, introverted state, but was broken from that funk when friends (including Nate) surprised me with a candle-covered chocolate cake that was as good as Jay Gatsby ever could have had.
