Big Lights, Bright City

            McInerney’s hit Bright Lights, Big City successfully uses 2nd person and the problems that city residents in 1980s America encountered in order criticize urban society and pull a lens of skepticism over the benefits of industrialization and consumerism. Furthermore, since the 1980s was an era of consumerism and uniformity in American history, much of Bright Lights, Big City is devoted to creating an authentic 1980s culture by integrating tabloid stories, urban decay, and drugs into crucial aspects of the narrative. McInerney uses 2nd person to reinforce this culture and to speak directly to the reader, using “you” to establish parallels between the situation of the readers and the narrator. For instance, McInerney’s narrator observes that, “You are the stuff of which consumer profiles—American Dream: Educated Middle-Class Model—are made. When you’re staying at the Plaza with your beautiful wife, doesn’t it make sense to order the best Scotch that money can buy before you go to the theater in your private limousine?” (McInerney 151). The narrator, therefore, not only gives the reader a brief overview of 1980s consumer culture, but he also invokes this culture to create purpose as his future in New York is crumbling and he strives to redefine himself. In this way, McInerney portrays 1980s consumer culture as an ethos that is imposed on the narrator and the reader just as McInerney imposes the situations in the book on the reader with a 2nd person narrative. Matt DelConte expands on this argument by observing:

McInerney's story… uses… [2^nd person]… to emphasize an existence dictated from the outside, an appropriate and effective narrative mode considering the novel's critique of the consumer culture of the 1980s…. The experience of the 80s is one imposed from the outside, an ambiguous presence of media/culture prescribing your desires and expectations; the novel exposes that in the 80s free choice was illusory. Second-person narration exemplifies this cultural climate, for it manifests in narrative technique the notion that someone or something outside of yourself dictates your thoughts and actions. (DelConte)

Furthermore, the idea that free choice in the 1980s is illusory parallels the claims made by Benjamin Barber in Consumed, entailing that the situation of infantilization by markets created by media and society in the 21st century is similar to consumerism in the 1980s.

By implicitly examining society in the 1980s, McInerney can relate to and help people struggling with the chaos of urbanization, making Bright Lights, Big City a sensation just as J. D. Sallinger’s Catcher in the Rye became a sensation after examining the troubles of teens in the 1940s and 50s. Furthermore, McInerney uses binary opposition to criticize American society in the 1980s by portraying the morally corrupt side of urbanization and juxtaposing it with traditional cultures and faiths. For instance, the narrator encounters a religious Hasidim and Rastafarian in New York’s subway and observes that, “He believes he is one of God’s chosen, whereas you feel like an integer in a random series of numbers… Sometimes you feel like the only man in the city without group affiliation” (McInerney 57). McInerney’s comparison of traditional religious values with the supposedly atheist urbanism that developed in cities in the 1980s reveals the desire American’s felt to belong to a group. The narrator endorses the desire to belong in a group by envying the simplistic and straightforward lifestyle of religious figures like Hasidim, indicating that urban residents were searching for a reprieve from the chaos of urbanism that people in cities needed to maintain their consumer lifestyles. The popularity of Bright Lights, Big City, therefore, was most likely caused by the relative ease that Americans related to the problems encountered by the narrator, such as the narrator’s anxiety over being alone in society. By revealing this double-edged sword, McInerney comments on the corrupting nature of consumerism, implying that consumerism traps people with cheap and abundant goods and matching the arguments of writers like Neil Postman and Benjamin Barber.

Works Cited

DelConte, Matt. “Why You Can't Speak: Second-Person Narration, Voice, and a New         Model for Understanding Narrative” Style. Vol. 37 No. 2 (2003). Questia. Web. 9         April 2014.

McInerney, Jay. Bright Lights, Big City. New York: Vintage Books, 1984. Print.