Mind Boggling End

Having finished reading the excruciatingly detailed, and at times painful, sex and technology induced exploits of James and Vaughan in the novel Crash, I have found myself still in shock by the world that J.G. Ballard has inhabited with his characters. Centered around the airport, the world in which James roams the streets is a massive labyrinth of highways, fly-overs, and major avenues. No matter where James is going, whether its Seagrave’s auto shop or Helen Remington’s home, the airport is used as a point of reference; ‘We were moving through a development zone on the southern fringes of the airport’ (pg. 92). The airport appears to be the center of James’ technology-dominated, a place where thousands of people interact on a daily basis with the greatest of transportation technologies, planes. James often describes ‘aircraft taking off from London Airport across the western perimeter [as] constellations of green and red that seemed to be shifting about large pieces of the sky’ (pg. 139). James recognizes that like cars, planes are on invisible highways as they cross the large sky, only with the capability of reaching greater distances than cars. There is a sense of continuity in the traffic, as if it could not be halted to a full stop, regardless of how heavy it is. In the end, a car accident, irrespective to the amount of cars involved, will never be able to fully halt the flow of traffic. Does James’ crash instigate the burgeoning of a life philosophy based on the flow of traffic? Is Vaughan nothing but a figment of James’ imagination, an attempt to comprehend the fairness of his own car crash?

Near the end of the novel, I began to doubt Vaughan existence as a physical human. There are a few passages that feed my suspicion of James creating Vaughan’s character just like the narrator from Fight Club does when he creates his alter ego Tyler Durden. The fact that James’ often makes absurd assumptions of what other people are thinking promotes the untrustworthiness in his story telling. For example, at the end of Crash, James explains that Vaughan follows his wife constantly with the possible intention of killing her in an accident, James feels ‘uncertain whether Vaughan would try to crash his car into Catherine’s, [yet he] made no attempt to warn her’ (pg. 218). The failure to tell a person you love that the ‘nightmare angel of highways’ (pg. 84) was after them seems to be an indication that James is either crazy or that he has no love for Catherine, which is simply not true. In addition, Catherine must have noticed if a man, that she supposedly knows, had followed her by car on a daily basis yet she ‘never referred to Vaughan’s pursuit of her’ (pg. 216). J.G Ballard has left me in a state of confusion, not knowing whether James and Vaughan are their own men, or if Vaughan and the whole story were only the result of James’ post traumatic stress disorder caused by his crash. Was James trying to escape his reality and find meaning behind his crash by creating this accident enthusiast, Vaughan?