THOMAS HAMMOND
“Chaos grows like a fungus.”
‘The Ballad of Joe Gillis’, which tells the story of an adolescent who commits suicide at a party, is a partial re-telling of The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger, where a similarly isolated teenager is expelled from school and travels to New York where he has several bizarre experiences. Adopting the postmodern technique of intertextuality found in the Ian McEwan short stories ‘Solid Geometry’ and ‘Butterflies’, my primary aim was to display how a character such as Holden Caulfield would be perceived by others. By only revealing Joe’s suicide at the end of the story, I attempted to convey how the narrator’s passive yet selfish attitude was a major factor in the protagonist’s suicide.
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