Billennium: A Dystopian Society

As a dystopian society, the government controls the lives of individuals compared to a utopian society where everything is considered perfect. In the dystopian story, Billennium by J.G. Ballard, overpopulation is the main concern in this society. There are too many people with a small capacity of space to live. In order for everyone to live here, there “homes” are small cubicles. They consist of only a few square meters of living space. In paragraph fourteen, the author states the population growth in this society: “Thirty million people are packed into the city now, a million increase in just one year. There’s been some pretty serious talk at the Housing Department.” This concludes that there had been a drastic increase of the population. In the story, a man by the name of John Ward lives in a cubicle in this society. In paragraph three, Ward describes his cubicle and how living in such a small place can be hard to live in: “ Built into a narrow alcove in a bend of the staircase between the fourth and fifth floors, its plywood walls flexed and creaked with every footstep like the timbers of a rotting windmill. Over a hundred people lived in the top three floors of the old rooming house, and sometimes Ward would lie awake on his narrow bunk until 2 or 3 a.m…” As you can see in the quote

It affects how people live and do daily necessities such as going to the bathroom. When the citizens leave their homes, they have traffic jams that could last for a long time due to so many people. It just does not affect these things, it also affects where people go out to eat or go to places for entertainment. It affects their everyday life and how it functions. This society altogether is a wreck. From having too many people to confined spaces to live, and to having so much congestion in this society, it cannot function properly and will continue to get worse if the population