Less Than Zero By Bret Easton Ellis: A Critical Analysis

Throughout this semester, I read three books for my English class; James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, and Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis. Each novel varied in topics and genre, but all three were unified by having protagonists who were in the process of questioning their identity based on societal values and their relationship to others. After reading these three novels, I then read several papers analyzing each novel in depth. Each article provided me with some new insight of each piece of literature examined in the articles. Following my research, I now write my own paper to provide my own critical analysis of the arguments presented in a few of the papers I have read. Upon the completion of my initial research,

Throughout the novel, it is evident to me that on account of David’s struggles with the secret homosexual aspect of his bisexuality, he is concerned about whether or not people perceive him as masculine enough. David’s fixation with the way he appears to others causes him to be envious of masculine men and “uneasy” around “feminine” men. Sanchez suggests that “David limits the homosexual identity to one that is defined through heteronormativity that forces biological males to be masculine” (Sanchez 5). David is repulsed by homosexuality, but even more repulsed by the feminine male “transvestites” in the bar, whom he does not see as man nor woman enough for anybody to “want one of them” (Baldwin 27). Sanchez’ argument is further supported by a scene in the novel in which David sees a sailor and stares “at him, though I did not know it, and wishing I were he... he wore his masculinity as unequivocally as he wore his skin” (Baldwin 92). However, I disagree with the link Sanchez proposes between race and gender roles, when she claims that “Giovanni’s Room subtly depicts racial issues in America through the novel’s manifestation of bisexuality” (Sanchez 2). I think that she is digging too deep for some type of hidden meaning and that David’s internal conflict arising from being homosexual is due to him being homosexual in that time period, not as some “literal and metaphorical symbol for blackness” (Sanchez