Money Money Money Money... MONEY

Being incredibly selfish, it is no surprise that John Self often turns the conversation of the narrative back to him. There is almost never a paragraph that does not refer back to the pains and successes of being John Self. He is often asserting his own face on the accomplishments of other, while denying he had an active part in his own failures. John Self's narrative voice is aggressive and confident, while also being cynical and self-conscious. On page 67 John Self is describing a tabloid he was reading after he returned from New York to London saying, "The other morning I opened my tabloid to find that, during my brief absence, the whole of England had been scalded by tumult and mutiny" In that one line, not even the whole sentence, John Self claimed the tabloid to be his, not any old tabloid or magazine, not a named tabloid, it was John Self's. Through very specific word choice he is taking credit for the publication of new, which he was completely uninformed of. He also is asserting that it was his leaving that drove the country to shit. He later goes on to explain that the problem of unemployment in England was the problem and says "I know how you feel. I haven't got that much to do all day myself. I sit here defencelessly, my mind full of earache and riot." While being completely full of himself, he then steps back to level with the rest of society in order to make himself seem more human. He undercuts the problem by twisting the meaning of "unemployment" by equating it with boredom and laziness, which are two things that John Self can identify with.