"Bright Light, Big City". "Losing" and "getting lost" in postmodern New York (eBook)

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,0, University of Cologne, language: English, abstract: The success of his debut novel "Bright Lights, Big City" brought Jay McInerney an astonishing amount of media coverage and an equivalent in book sales, but not much approval, let alone deeper analysis of his work, from critics and scholars. In fact, the hype that surrounded him and his fellow “brat-pack” writers is likely to have prevented any serious scholarly interest in this kind of new urban literature back in the day. “Bright Lights, Big City” was dismissed as a “yuppie bildungsroman- full of tortured self- searching and struggling- writer romance” (Young/Caveney 1992: 47) at first, without any considerable novelty or value. However, the enthusiasm of the large, young readership showed that there was something to McInerney’s novel that other novels did not offer- a setting and a language that were familiar and uncomplicated for them, but, at the same time, an account of relevant, postmodern issues that very well did concern the Bright Young Things of the 80s, but were usually seized in more elitist literature, and thus, eluded an audience that was ready for them to be taken up.

This thesis attempts to perform a detailed analysis, starting with a brief description of the historical and cultural features of the setting and then proceeding to the interpretation of all important themes, motifs and symbols of the book in the context of postmodernism but also in general terms. Each chapter investigates the influence of a certain aspect of the protagonist’s life on his crisis, especially in how far one or the other led him to a life on the edge and to the loss of the self. In order to understand why, in the end, the protagonist has to “learn everything all over again” (BLBC 174) to get back on the right track, it is essential to point out the roles that Amanda- his opportunist model wife- his job in the fact checking department and the death of his mother played over time, and how drugs and Ray-Ban sunglasses seem to provide temporary solutions for the most acute of his troubles.