Bright Lights, Big City Chapter Summary & Analysis - Chapter One, It's Six A. M. Do You Know Where You Are? Summary

Chapter One, It's Six A. M. Do You Know Where You Are? Summary

Bright Lights, Big City narrates a few disastrous days in the life of an aspiring young writer in the swirling, madcap world of young, upwardly mobile Manhattan in the 1980s. The book's narrator, plagued by a failed marriage and an unnamed sense of loss and guilt, watches helplessly from the distance of a cocaine-induced haze as he proceeds to squander his prestigious job and all sense of dignity and self-respect. Under the cover of an ironic sensibility, impervious to his surroundings, he plunges deeper into an abyss of nightclubs, shallow conversation, sex and drugs.

The narrator opens his story in a downtown Manhattan disco, Heartbreak or Lizard Lounge, at an unspecified hour of the early morning. He addresses himself as "You" and seems bewildered to find himself in a conversation with a strange, bald and tattooed woman. He blames his situation on his friend Tad Allagash, who drags him from...
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