Bright Lights, Big City

Nicknamed “Bolivian Marching Powder,” “Peruvian flake,” and “toot,” the narrator relies on snorts of cocaine throughout the novel, both to have a good time and, increasingly, to get through bad days with optimism and confidence. Cocaine is symbolic of the excesses of the 1980s, and the dark pessimism that hovered over a city that, after a period of bankruptcy in the late-1970s and early-1980s, was suddenly flush with both capital and drugs. Cocaine is plentiful—present in every nightclub and on the street—and Tad’s favorite gift to present to the narrator to entice him to another nightclub or to convince him to perform another favor. It’s a form of tender more appealing than money and more desirable than offers of true friendship and loyalty.

For the narrator, cocaine also helps him avoid his feelings of alienation and abandonment, brought on by both the recent death of his mother and his separation from his wife, Amanda. By the end of the novel, after having confronted his grief over losing his mother, it seems that he’s ready to stop self-medicating with the drug.

While talking to the tabloid journalist, Richard Fox, the narrator notices a baby cockroach crawling up the wall and wonders if he should crush it or let it be. The roach is a symbol of his own declining morality and possible slip into the gutter in the aftermath of his firing from the magazine. Fox is trying to entice the narrator into writing a tell-all exposé about the magazine. The narrator’s need for money and desire for revenge, however, do not outweigh his lingering sense of honor. Looking at the cockroach forces him to confront the moral quandary of how far into the lower depths he is willing to go. His decision not to write the piece reveals that he is not as morally bankrupt as he suspects he’s becoming.

The narrator reads the story about Coma Baby and Coma Mom in the New York Post which, in the 1980s, was a newspaper notorious for sensational tabloid journalism. The tabloid story recurs throughout the novel and serves as a distraction for the narrator before confronting the anxieties of working with Clara. In observing the absurd, tragic, and tawdry details of others’ lives every morning on the subway, daily commuters, like the narrator, avoid dealing with the unpleasant discomforts of their own lives.

The narrator’s fascination with the saga of Coma Baby and Coma Mom is also related to his unresolved feelings about the loss of his mother and his possible guilt for, it seems, assisting her in committing suicide while she was dying of cancer—a pivotal event that the novel mentions subtly. The eventual death of Coma Mom and the baby’s survival is especially triggering. Shortly before the announcement, the narrator had a premonition of the woman’s death in a dream. This occurrence reinforces his feelings of grief and guilt in response to his own mother’s death.