Bright Lights, Big City Style

Bright Lights, Big City Style

Point of View

The story's point of view is the second person. The narrator addresses himself as "you". This distancing device combines the intimacy of a first person narrative with the objectivity of a disinterested observer. The immediacy of the narrative is heightened by the present tense of the action. The reader watches along with the narrator with slightly bemused horror as he tells of himself undergoing real-time humiliations and tragic-comic defeats.

The distance afforded him by the use of the second person allows him the freedom to see himself through a poignant, almost tender, yet a markedly un-self pitying lens. Despite the potentially alienating effect of the second person point of view, the effect is largely comic through McInerney's deft handling of the character and his lack of self-awareness.

Setting

The setting is Manhattan in the 1980s, the era of Wall Street boom and bust, Reaganomic social and economic policies and...
(read more)