An Analysis of The Literary Devices Used N The Book Generation X by Douglas Coupland

Generations

Have you ever wondered what the life of someone from another generation was like? I’ve often wondered what living life in my twenties would be like if I were from my parent’s generation. I think we often have misconceptions that generations before us have always had it better without really researching the details on the kind of lifestyle they lived. In Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, he writes a tale about three individuals living life in their mid-twenties, around the 1980s, who are struggling to live by the standards set by the generation before them. I believe that the idea of this book is to encourage the fact that the Generation X and the Baby Boomers (the generation following World War II) are not to be grouped together. This book through the use of its characterization and colloquialisms gave me the impression that the generation before my own has more in common with millennials than we anticipated and has changed my overall view of their time in history.

The key aspect of this book connecting its readers to the story is depiction of the main characters. The book begins with three characters: Andy, Dag, and Claire. The perspective of the book is set in first person: Andy’s point of view. These characters come off as obnoxious people at the first introduction of them. They all three seem to have an inner anguish that they deem necessary to complain about. As an unappealing as it may be at first, their whines become apparent later on. The stories of these three develops throughout the first several chapters as each person unravels their own life story that brought them together as neighbors. As each character presents their own story, they each become more likable and entirely too relatable. These stories were about quitting meaningless jobs, not being able to find love in a materialistic world, and many more stories I felt I could read about with intent to care about the generation prior to mine. I began to see my elders (people my parents’ age) as having lived life similar to the people I know today who are continuously struggling with love, materialism, and meaningless service jobs all the while trying to figure out what life means to them. The main quality about these characters is that they are exceptionally good at story telling. They aren’t motivated by a lot other than the stories about their lives or the stories they make up for fun that define their generation. In that sense, I want to compare them to Louis XVI, who was more interested in his hobbies than ruling a kingdom and became disconnected to his chaotic surroundings because he wasn’t mature enough yet to rule France. This analogy is fitting because these characters aren’t ready to live the life the generation before them set up or have not yet figured out how they want change their society. This brought me the question of: “Do people’s upbringings (or lack thereof) bring them in to these positions in their life? Is this a common theme in history?”

As the story develops, the supporting characters in this work of fiction help shape a solid back story of the main roles that begins to put an answer to my questions about them. Each main character is paired with a supporting role that gives insight into where their problems were born. Claire’s boyfriend, Tobias, is a superficial guy disliked by the other character. They refer to him as a “yuppie,” an actual term incorporated in to the book that was used in the 1980s. It describes a young person who is well paid and fashionable. Elvissa, a love interest for Dag who is unusual and far too stuck in the past. Tyler, Andy’s spoiled rotten teenage brother. One of Claire’s issues is divorced parents and the idea that love is now a materialistic concept. Tobias shows her that materialism has become a prominent part of her current society. Andy’s younger brother symbolizes the large family he came from and the idea of feeling like just a number. Dag’s unusual love interests show his lack of attention span in anything ordinary or monotonous. These secondary characters contribute to their life stories, making it feel like I was greater in depth with them. I felt like I had an understanding with Dag in the way that I have a fear of doing the same boring, meaningless job every day and that my life won’t have meaning or adventure. This also begins to explain their daring decision to move away from urban life to a desert area. They wanted to create their own rules after the previous thirty years of rules made by their elders. One of the best and most amusing lines of the book is that they felt they were handed over the world “. . . like so much skid-marked underwear” (Generation X, 86). Their anti-establishment state of mind begins to make sense because you realize that they don’t want to live life by the book. This relates to me in the sense that I felt encouraged that I should remain my own person in the midst of all of the social changes lately.

The discouraging part of this book is that you don’t see many attempts to make change. Nor do you see the characters eventually succeeding in making changes in their own lives that defy the social standards. They soon seem to find that they are living life exactly how they were before they tried to attempt to make life different for themselves. I understand that the book is more of a fictional account about a generation written by a man who wanted others to understand what his generation went through, what they were about, and why they are sometimes referred to as “the Silent Generation.” However, if it had been pure fiction, I would have wanted to see a new society that they created beyond any of our imaginations, such as how Marxism was mentioned in the Communist Manifesto. That’s the trick of it, though, our society has been so set up for us by capitalism, social standards, and regulatory laws, is it really easy to imagine one that’s different? Especially now, since media is so prominent that we are easily influenced by what we see and hear. Misconceptions are easily thrown about us. However, I also think that’s the very key as to why they were called the Silent Generation. They didn’t have the same means of mass communication that we do and a lot of members of my generation use it to their advantage in attempts to make social change and question our society why it is the way it is. The only problem now is millennials have become completely immersed in the materialistic world laid out for us long ago, so possibly while half of Generation X was busy longing for change; the other half of Generation X involved in “yuppie life” made the solidification of our current society. A take away that could be gotten from this book is that changes are hard to be made in the midst of conforming.

I personally enjoyed the book in the sense that I like that it stood for a struggling generation; however, I have a few critiques to end my analysis. Members of different generations all identify themselves with their own set of issues that came with the time in history they were born. I personally believe Generation X’s issues were the transition into the lives of millennials today, so I think I was interested in seeing that aspect. Did I absolutely love the book to the point that I would read it again? No, I can’t envision myself reading the entire book again. The value of the book to me was the insight to another time. I picked the book because I wanted to read a work recently written that had to do with a more modern insight and interpretation of history. I consider myself a light reader who enjoys simple works mixed with humor and an underlying theme or meaning in the plot. In a sense, the book had most of those literary aspects. My one big issue with the book is that it didn’t feel like there was really not an overall plot. It was more of a collection of stories from a group of characters packed in to one small plot, making the overall plot feel like a sub-plot. I wondered if maybe the book would have been better off told as short stories of these characters told in each of their perspective (such as modern books tend to do) to detail their lives. I found it hard to find myself interested in reading about events in the book from Andy’s point of view because his thought process felt more like third people. He spoke of the others and his surroundings more than himself. When I came back to a first person line you tend to have forgotten that another character was telling the overall story. It could have been better written in various first persons or an overall third. The purpose of the book’s unusual form may have been to identify a group of outcasts in their generation as a whole without disconnecting them from their stories, but from an easy reader’s perspective it could have been written in a more concise manner. Another aspect I had a love/hate opinion of was the characters’ usage of their own individual slang. They seemed to use these odd terms that they create themselves to go along with their identity. These terms are defined on the side of the page on the point of their reference. Some of them are genius, while others were seemingly pedantic and sounded like gibberish. A real popular one was the use of the word “McJob” that identifies the idea of being stuck in a service job such as one at McDonalds. A couple of terms I thought were good and self-explanatory were “Boomer Envy,” “Clique Maintenance,” “Lessness,” and “Status Substitution” helped shaped the distaste for materialism in the book. Some terms that didn’t make sense and made me scrunch my noise at the meaning were “emotional ketchup burst,” “bleeding ponytail,” and “survivulousness.” These were failed attempts at describing their emotional issues to me. With all that being said, my opinion towards the book was that it could have been better but it got the point across.

The literary devices used in this book helps convey Coupland’s message that Generation X can be identified as its own and that they were the first generation introduced to our society’s current issues. Generation X is a different kind of historical fiction work. Through this book you can get a sense of what life like might have like as an individual from another generation. The lives of Andy, Claire, and Dag painted the picture of the kind of individual you may have been in the 1980s. It makes you wonder, how will our time be written about in the future? We need books written in recent times to signify our world as it is so people in a hundred years can understand and learn from it, and I think that’s why historical literature is important.