Piecing Together J. G. Ballard’s "The Atrocity Exhibition"

J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition can easily be classified as his most experimental novel, one that, more than any other of his works, succeeds in presenting, or perhaps representing, the fragmented condition of a media-saturated Western culture. On the surface, it does appear to be a postmodern and seemingly chaotic bricolage of pop iconography, landscapes, and medical references arranged non-linearly and without plot, and yet there is a unifying principle at work, anchoring the texts in a specific ideological context of 1960s Western culture. The main argument of this paper expands on Debord’s study of spectacle and regards The Atrocity Exhibition as a work that not only attempts to frustrate reading expectations, but also addresses the cultural shift towards spectacular society.