FROM NEW YORK TO LOS ANGELES : NARRATIVES OF "I" IN THE WONDERLAND AMERICA OF FOUR BRAT PACK WRITERS"

Abstract

This thesis analyses the narratological strategies employed by four modem Brat Pack writers -- namely Jay Mcinerney, Tama Janowitz, David Leavitt and Bret Easton Ellis -- in depicting urban American life through "I"-narratives. Adopting the approach advanced by Gerald Prince and Michael J. Toolan, the study evaluates how multifarious perceptions of urban America and their attendant values (as represented by New York and Los Angeles) are filtered, modulated and shaped through various types of what are formerly known as first-person narrative voices. Applying also concepts from Barthes and RimmonKenan, it outlines a heuristic framework for a comparison among the various texts from which we can elicit a literary identity of urban America and its mores. Chapter One begins by revising the notion of the "I" or self from an essentialist, autonomous agent to a consensual subject governed by narrative. This is applied to the study of Brat Pack fiction, which reflects vividly the materialistic America of the '80s. Chapter Two closes in upon the narrators of Janowitz's American Dad, Ellis's Less Than Zero, and Mclnerney's Story of My Life, and unearths the inter-generational factor as playing an important role in the characterisation of the youth. Chapter Three analyses Leavitt's stories, and demonstrates how his narrators differ from those of the previous chapter, in coping with strained relationships and sudden mishaps, in their search for self-actualisation. Chapter Four sums up by showing how different strategies position and condition the reader ideologically through the narratives, thus shedding light on how we integrate, interiorize and ultimately systemise our perceptions of the world in which we live.