Magisterarbeit
zur Erlangung des Magistergrades (M.A.) am Fachbereich für Geistes- und Erziehungswissenschaften der Technischen Universität Braunschweig

“The Great Depression Is Our Lives.” Busted Boomers and Identity Crises in Generation X, American Psycho, and Fight Club

vorgelegt von Nadine Klemens
2004

Table of Contents

1. Introduction ... 1
1.1. The Novels as Cultural Texts ... 2
1.2. Outline ... 8

2. A Culture, a Demographic, a Style? Generation X Defined ... 9
2.1. The Construction of Identity ... 11
2.2. Identity and Cultural Change ... 13
2.3. Generation X and the Postmodern Condition ... 16

3. Searching for Meaning in Life. The Group of Slackers in Generation X ... 18
3.1. Bedtime Stories ... 22
3.2. The End of History ... 28
3.3. Loneliness Virus ... 30

4. Yuppie Masquerade. The Elite Xer in American Psycho ... 34
4.1. Hedonistic Shells ... 40
4.2. Ritualizing the Daily Void ... 43
4.3. The Beast inside the Beauty ... 46

5. Trapped-up in the IKEA Nest. The Twentynothing in Fight Club ... 52
5.1. A Fake among the Doomed ... 55
5.2. Sometimes, Tyler Speaks for Me ... 57
5.3. Destroying Corporate America ... 64

6. Hybrid Identities – Hybrid Fictions? ... 69
6.1. Representing the Postmodern Condition ... 73
6.2. Representative Busters? ... 79

7. Summary of a Crisis ... 81

8. Bibliography ... 85

1. Introduction

“We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.”¹ This is what the nameless narrator of Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel Fight Club says to define his generation, the age group which has alternately been labeled as ‘Baby Bust Generation,’ ‘MTV Generation,’ ‘Invisible Generation,’ or ‘Generation X.’ All of these terms apply to the birth cohort of the years 1961 to 1981. Since these young people are described by generational scholars as the most diverse generation in sociological history, it is not surprising that there are difficulties in finding one common label to define this birth group. As ‘Generation X’ is the most widely used name for the generation, I will use this term in my paper.
The opening quote shows that the young people of this birth group seem to be in a spiritual crisis because they no longer have to fight in wars, they do not have to fight for causes – in short, they do not have to struggle through extreme situations as most generations before them had to do. Instead, they live in a world in which everything seems to be at the ready for them: tons of shopping malls and supermarkets that contain anything one can possibly think of or wish for. Yet, they experience a spiritual crisis. As many members of older generations may now well ask: How can a world of seemingly endless choices and resources be so disturbing as to throw a whole generation into crisis?
In my paper I want to examine this question by analyzing three novels that deal with the identity crisis of Generation X: Generation X. Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) by Douglas Coupland, American Psycho (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis, and Fight Club (1996) by Chuck Palahniuk. In these books the protagonists face similar deadlocks connected to life in the consumerist world of the 1980s and 1990s, however, each of them searches for a different way out of this dead end. According to studies of Generation X literature, the three novels I will be discussing are typical of their time, as they deal with postmodern, or rather, consumerist culture. Postmodernism as such is a problematic term and thus usually resists a coherent definition as
the term itself remains resolutely contradictory [...], none the less, [it] provides a focus for much lively and often controversial debate about the nature of contemporary culture [...] as well as providing a kind of catch-all term for the whole condition of late capitalist society itself. [...] At a most basic level we might understand the mode of postmodernism as a heterogeneous interweaving of questions which escape any singular or unified answer.²

Hence, life in the postmodern condition presents the characters of the novels with questions and problems to which there is no definite answer. They struggle with a fragmented world and therefore, the novels show that whereas the generations preceding the Xer birth cohort had issues or events of historical scope and impact that bound them together as a birth group, it seems that the issue that binds Generation X together is their struggle with the culture they live in.

[...]

1 Chuck Palahniuk. Fight Club. London: Vintage, 1997, 149.
2 Anthony Easthope and Kate Mc Gowan (eds.). A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998, 181.