XXX

Ballard has been intriguing me in this part of the reading with his descriptions of the normal goings on around him. He uses the people that make up the background of the story to casually reveal the taboo side of all man. At the start of chapter 17 when Vaughan, James, and Catherine were approaching an accident on the road Ballard describes the amount of people who were gathering to watch the scene saying, "the spectators leaned elbow to elbow on the metal rail" (152) watching from above. Ballard describes a seemingly simple event, but the fact that all of these people are stopping to leisurely watch as car accident victims are scraped off the road reveals that most people are at least fascinated by violence. Later in the chapter when the onlookers are leaving the scene Ballard is describing the aftermath of the event; "A burly man in a truck-driver's drivers jacket helped his wife up the embankment, a hand on her buttocks. This perverse sexuality filled the air..." (157). By placing those seemingly normal people in the same psychological realm as Vaughan, someone who in society would be considered a sexual deviant, Ballard is making the reader question his/her own sexual fantasies.

The scene at the carwash was also very interesting when thinking about character development in the novel. Vaughan from the start was a very demanding character, he took over the topic of the first sentence but didn't even appear in the novel until halfway in. He stormed into James' life, turned it on his head, and then had sex with his wife in the backseat of his own car while he was driving! That's wild, and James liked it. And Catherine, who had first been unfaithful to James, then reaffirmed herself to him, is now back to cheating on him in front of him. These characters seems to be using a much different level of reasoning than what is commonly accepted.