Finish Crash. Also read the "simulacrum" essay under Resources. Your post should be a harvesting of the themes in the novel, including the big ones - technology, time, and death. With your future paper in mind, you might focus on a specific motif: photography, the metaphoric world of the novel (in which everything resembles something else), impressions or records left by people, the nature of sexuality. The fundamental question is: what is Ballard's intent? Is he being disruptive in a Swiftian manner - throwing out all our normal ways of seeing life and the world - or does he have a message about modern life? Is the book fundamentally a comedy or
tragedy. Like many transgressive novels,
Crash resembles a
picaresque (although it is not a pure picaresque like
Candide or
Don Quixote). Here are some other provocative questions you can pursue (if you want):
1. Are Vaughn and Ballard the same person?
2. Is Vaughn a symbol of the literary "author"?
3. Does Ballard, after his crash, imagine the events of this book?
Pick a specific passage or two and cite page numbers in your post.
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