Bright Lights, Big City

“Tad is the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. He is either your best self or your worst self, you’re not sure which. Earlier in the evening it seemed clear that he was your best self.”

Tad is a foil for the narrator. He exhibits the self-assurance and cool confidence that the narrator performs or assumes only when under the influences of cocaine and alcohol. When he’s high, he feels a like a better match for Tad. When he comes down from the drug, he’s confronted by the vapidity that draws them together.

“The problem is, for some reason you think you are going to meet the kind of girl who is not the kind of girl who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. When you meet her you are going to tell her that what you really want is a house in the country with a garden. New York, the club scene, bald women—you’re tired of all that.”

The narrator describes his longing for companionship and his inability to meet the kind of woman whom he believes he deserves. His desire for sincere companionship is foiled by his obsessions with drugs and partying. He seems to long for a quieter life, more akin to his suburban upbringing and for a woman more like his mother. 

“Here you are again. All messed up and no place to go.”

These lines conclude the first chapter in which the narrator comes to terms with his moral dissolution. The reader is meant to understand that both this excursion and its conclusion are typical for the narrator. Each evening ends with him dissipated in drink and drugs and feeling more alone than he was before immersing himself in the nightclub world. 

“In fact, you don’t want to be in Fact. You’d much rather be in Fiction.” 

These lines are a double entendre. The narrator is literally referring to his career ambition to leave the Department of Factual Verification in favor of becoming a fiction writer, though he lacks the discipline. Additionally, the narrator uses cocaine regularly to distract himself from real life—his feelings of grief regarding his mother’s death, for example—which suggests that he lives a sort of fiction.

“You are the kind of guy who always hopes for a miracle at the last minute. Manhattan does not lie in an earthquake zone, but there is always the possibility of nuclear war. Short of that, nothing you can imagine would alter the publishing schedule.” 

The narrator, who is an inveterate procrastinator and not confident in his abilities, is trying to get out of his fact-checking work on an article on the French elections. His incompetence on this assignment is the cause of his firing. The narrator’s fantasy about nuclear war is particular to his time. The Cold War, with its attendant threat of nuclear annihilation, was still palpable in the 1980s. 

“Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you can clean it up a little you don’t want to invite anyone inside.” 

The narrator uses his apartment—unaffordable, messy, and filled with reminders of his ex-wife—as a metaphor for his mental state. He’s afraid to let anyone get to know him truly, until he meets Tad’s cousin Vicky who makes him feel less ashamed of his pain and his shortcomings.

“You see yourself as the kind of guy who appreciates a quiet night at home with a good book. A little Mozart on the speakers, a cup of cocoa on the arm of the chair, slippers on the feet. Monday night.” 

In this quote, the narrator expresses the schism between how he envisions himself and how his behavior manifests. In the first few chapters, he frequently uses the phrase “kind of guy” to envision a type that he strives to become—a man of taste and moderation.

“You feel that if only you could make yourself sit down at a typewriter you could give shape to what seems merely a chain of pointless disasters. Or you could get revenge, tell your side of the story, cast some version of yourself in the role of wronged hero. Hamlet on the battlements. Maybe get outside autobiography altogether, lose yourself in the purely formal imperatives of words in the correct and surprising sequence, or create a fantasy world of small furry and large scaly creatures.” 

The narrator fantasizes about how much easier his life would be if he could summon the discipline to become a writer, which would allow him to make sense of his life. However, his inclination still is to regard himself as a tragic hero, which is dishonest. This penchant for not looking at himself squarely fuels his drug and alcohol abuse. He’s aware of this, which prompts him to imagine becoming a fantasy writer instead. This would, he thinks, allow him to get away from himself altogether.

“You wanted to be Dylan Thomas without the paunch, F. Scott Fitzgerald without the crack-up. You wanted to skip over the dull grind of actual creation.”

The narrator describes his fantasy of achieving fame, but he casts himself alongside tragic, alcoholic writers. He doesn’t eschew their excesses, only the fact that they succumbed to the physical and mental consequences of their behavior. He also expresses his wish to achieve their level of recognition without doing much of the actual work. In these lines, he reveals both his egotism and his laziness.

“You hate this posturing, even as you persist, as if it were important for these two strangers to admire you for all the wrong reasons.” 

The narrator is talking to Elaine and Theresa. Elaine used to work with Amanda as a fellow model. He is talking about his work at the magazine, which Theresa admires, and describes it as more glamorous than it is. This is one of several instances in which he finds himself saying things that are patently untrue to obscure his true self from those whom he meets.

“After you met Amanda and came to New York, you began to feel that you were no longer on the outside looking in. When you were growing up you suspected that everyone else had been let in on some fundamental secret which was kept from you […] This conviction grew with each new school you attended. Your father’s annual job transfers made you the perennial new kid.”

The narrator reveals that his sense of inadequacy stems from an itinerant upbringing. He was constantly dragged to places where he didn’t want to be growing up, places where he never felt a sense of belonging. This changed when he made the personal decision to move to New York—a place where he felt that he belonged, due to his ambitions.

“The sweet nasal burn hits like a swallow of cold beer on a hot August day. Tad fixes another round and by the time you all troop out of the bathroom you are feeling omnipotent. You are upwardly mobile. Certainly something excellent is bound to happen.” 

The narrator describes the feeling of snorting cocaine—the refreshing burst of confidence. He feels like a trooper—that is, like someone who can confront what would be perceived as personal danger under sober conditions. He feels, too, a sense of belonging among Manhattan’s hip, wealthy crowd, as though he, too, is on the verge of joining their elite ranks.

“You did not feel that you could open quite all of your depths to her, or fathom hers, and sometimes you feared she didn’t have depths. But you finally attributed this to an unrealistic, youthful idealism. Growing up meant admitting you couldn’t have everything.” 

The narrator is thinking about his relationship with Amanda, and the distance that always existed between them. He overlooked their inability to achieve true intimacy, not understanding how significant it was that he couldn’t reveal himself completely to her, or she to him. He’s correct to attribute this misunderstanding to youthful idealism, but the naïve ideal was that he could be married to Amanda without trying to know her better.

“You apologize […] You tell her there are so damn many things on your mind. You have a bad memory for details. You can tell her the date of the Spanish Armada, but you couldn’t even guess at the balance of your checkbook. Every day you misplace your keys or your wallet […] It’s so hard just getting in here every morning, let alone remembering all that you’re supposed to do […] So many little things. The big things—at least the big things declare open combat. But these details…When you are engaged, life or death, with the main army—then to have these niggardly details sniping at you from the goddamned trees…”

The narrator feels apologetic toward Megan, who has been a good friend, always attendant to his needs, while he consistently neglects hers. He has difficulty with responsibility—the daily details of life—while obsessing over what he would consider the big picture: his overall purpose.

“She said that certain facts are accessible only from one point of view—the point of view of the creature who experiences them. You think she meant that the only shoes we can ever wear are our own. Meg can’t imagine what it’s like for you to be you, she can only imagine herself being you.”

The narrator considers Megan’s ideas about lived experience and how we form ideas and opinions as a result. He concludes that Megan can sympathize with his pain, but she cannot viscerally understand his grief and frustrations.

“‘We met in a bar. It was too dark to read.’ ‘Not so dark that she couldn’t see you were her ticket out of Trailer Park Land. Bright lights, big city.’” 

The narrator is talking to Tad about how he met Amanda. He’s responding to a joke that Tad made about Amanda’s obvious lack of intelligence—or, at least, her capacity in relation to that of the narrator. Tad’s comment about Amanda using the narrator to get out of Kansas is probably both true and tinged with classism. 

“For Tad, Amanda’s departure was not only not surprising but inevitable. It confirmed his world view. Your heartbreak is just another version of the same old story.” 

Tad is too cynical to sympathize with the narrator’s pain or wounded pride over being abandoned by his wife. For someone who devalues the importance of love and romance as much as Tad does, the narrator’s circumstance was inevitable.

“People are looking at you and you are afraid they know your every thought. You brace yourself with the fact that you looked at Amanda every day for almost three years and you don’t have the ghost of a clue what was going on in her mind. She showed all the vital signs and made all the right noises. She said she loved you.” 

The narrator fears that he is transparent in a way that Amanda never was. In this passage, he also expresses his fear that one can never know another person completely, even when they share the same space. 

“You considered violence and you considered reconciliation. But what you are left with is a premonition of the way your life will fade behind you, like a book you have read too quickly, leaving a dwindling trail of images and emotions, until all you can remember is a name.” 

The narrator is recalling his fantasies about how he would either avenge himself for Amanda’s leaving him or win her back. He realizes, though, that she is gone forever; all that will be left are memories that will feel increasingly far away. Here, the narrator expresses how easily significant relationships can feel like distant and almost dream-like experiences.

“You drink and talk. Under the spell of alcohol your differences recede. You and Michael and Peter and Sean and Dad stand against the world. The family has been fucked over, but you’re going to tough it out. Forget that slut Amanda. The doctors who couldn’t save your mother’s life and wouldn’t tell you what was going on. Clara Tillinghast. The priest who, at your mother’s deathbed, said, ‘We’ve seen some beautiful deaths with cancer.’” 

The narrator is finally sitting down with his brother, Michael, whom he has been avoiding. The narrator is slowly realizing the importance of family, and how they will always be bonded by the loss of the narrator’s mother. He, his father, and his brothers have formed, in his mind, a fraternity united against those whom he feels have wronged them all. The narrator’s sexism shows, too, in this passage. By constructing Amanda as a “slut,” he can reduce her significance and make it seem as though she were never worthy of his love and devotion.

“You described the feeling you’d always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn’t worry quite so much about why.” 

Here, the narrator harks back to a sentiment he expressed earlier about feeling like a perpetual outsider. Additionally, he deals with what is now called “imposter syndrome”—the feeling of not being particularly competent, despite trying to appear so. His realizes that his anxiety is common. 

“The apartment has become very small […] Your head is pounding with voices of confession and revelation. You followed the rails of white powder across the mirror in pursuit of a point of convergence where everything was cross-referenced according to a master code. For a second, you felt terrific. You were coming to grips. Then the coke ran out; as you hoovered the last line, you saw yourself hideously close-up with a rolled twenty sticking out of your nose.” 

At the beginning of the final chapter, the narrator comes to terms with his discontent. While cocaine helped him mask his feelings of guilt (probably about assisting his mother in committing suicide) and acceptance of his losses, he’s now forced to deal with himself and what drug abuse has turned him into. He’s disgusted with his self-image, which contrasts with his ideal self-perception as a cultured man of moderation.

“There are cobbles on the street where the asphalt has worn through. You think of the wooden shoes of the first Dutch settlers on these same stones. Before that, Algonquin braves stalking game along silent trails.” 

In a passage that is reminiscent of the final lines of The Great Gatsby, the narrator imagines New York when the first European settlers came. He imagines a place that, to Europeans, still felt new. He likens this to his own feeling when he first came to the city, expecting a new life and greater opportunities.