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Trainspotting: An Ambiguous Spot Into British Society After Thatcherite Policies

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Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting: An Ambiguous Spot into British Society after Thatcherite Policies (?)
Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a fuckin couch watching mind numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth; choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life. Well, ah choose no tae choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that, it's thair fuckin problem (237).
Set in Leith, a port town in Scotland close to Edinburgh, and published in 1994, Trainspotting is regarded Irvine Welsh's most prominent work of fiction and it also has a movie adaptation produced in 1996. The novel, briefly, provide the reader with an account of the Scottish youth in the early 1990s with different and fragmented stories of male and female characters. The novel, thus, is a reflection the post-Thatcherite era and the problems in the society are reflected through the characters and their lifestyles. This paper, in short, aims to elaborate on such social issues as class, use of drugs, violence mentioned in Welsh's novel with references to related theories and articles. …show more content…

According to Matt Mcguire,
The novel takes its title from an episode set in Leith's disused Central Station, a place that gestures towards an industrial past that has all but disappeared. A largely labour based society has been replaced by the ethics of mass consumerism. As already indicated, Trainspotting rarely depicts people working. Instead, through their use of heroin, Welsh's characters are in thrall to an abject form of conspicuous consumption, caught in a cycle of behaviour that will eventually destroy them

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