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My thesis will concentrate on Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting and Denis Johnson’s collection of short stories, Jesus’ Son. These two books were published—in Scotland and America respectively—in the early 1990’s, and portray the lives of heroin addicts. I argue that these works, while portraying many universalities surrounding drug experience, express larger distinctions in Scottish and American ... read moreculture through the junky narrators’ relationships with their overarching national identities. Though the narrators seem to rebel against society, heroin’s metaphorical role is shaped by each text’s deeply ingrained cultural consciousness. Just as both narrators fail to escape, via drugs, the circumstances that have accumulated and built up their individual lives, they cannot escape the historical pasts that shape their individual consciousnesses. Just as they are simultaneously consuming and being consumed by drugs, they are assuming agency over—yet ultimately, unconsciously relinquishing this agency to—place, culture, and time.read less
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