The Hero's Strange Sense of Time in Martin Amis's Money: A Suicide Note (1984)

This paper focuses on why the hero of Martin Amis's Money, John Self, manifests an unusual sense of the passage time. There are two reasons behind this: an empirical factor and a factor related to the hero's act of narration. Amis's text mediates a sense of radical change, change that is viewed most powerfully in New York during the 1980s, from the British perspective of Self, through which Amis's attitude to this change emerges as negative. What also emerges in Amis's text is the victory of narrative over narrator. Self, as the narrator of his suicide note, is trapped by the narrative