Less Than Zero: Identity, Emptiness, and Existentialism

Introduction: A Story of Aimlessness and Lost Meaning

Bret Easton Ellis's novel Less Than Zero follows closely the bleak and dreadful life of a rich teenager, Clay, whose sense of identity comes from the group of "brats" he roams around with. Clay and his vain circle live in the most fashionable area, Beverly Hills, and share a common identity. They all talk the same way, wear the same designer labels, drive similar cars, look tanned and beautiful, and are addicted to cocaine — referred to throughout the book simply as "coke." The life of sex, drugs, and parties is completely void of any real excitement, and this is a fact that everyone knows but no one is willing to acknowledge. To see the flaws in this society means forfeiting your membership in the group, and that was something those rich kids could not afford. "Fitting in" was all about doing what everyone else did and ignoring real feelings or emotions. This was the Southern California lifestyle of the 1980s — a paradise for the self-absorbed and self-indulgent.

Everything about Clay's behavior, his family, his friends, and his lifestyle signifies a wasted life — a life with no hope, no future, no real achievement, and no genuine meaning. Clay's life is a symbol of aimlessness. This is Hollywood literature at its realistic peak. A scene at a restaurant where Clay and his parents are celebrating Christmas reveals the real emptiness and shallowness of a Beverly Hills lifestyle:

"I'm sitting in the main room at Chasen's with my parents and sisters and it's late, nine-thirty or ten, on Christmas Eve. Instead of eating anything, I look down at my plate and move the fork across it, back and forth, and become totally fixated on the fork cutting a path between the peas. My father startles me by pouring some more champagne into my glass. My sisters look bored and tan and talk about anorexic friends and some Calvin Klein model and they look older than I remember them looking, even more so when they hold their glasses up by the stem and drink the champagne slowly; they tell me a couple of jokes that I don't get and tell my father what they want for Christmas.

I don't look at my parents too much, just keep running my hand through my hair, wishing I had some coke, anything, to get through this and I look around the restaurant, which is only half-full; people are murmuring to each other and their whispers carry somehow and I realize that all it comes down to is that I'm this eighteen-year-old boy with shaking hands and blond hair and with the beginnings of a tan and semistoned sitting in Chasen's on Doheny and Beverly, waiting for my father to ask me what I want for Christmas." (64–66)

The life is empty because it lacks aim and meaning. The kids in this world have everything they could ask for, received on a silver platter, and yet they do not know which road to take. They choose a life of sex and drugs in exchange for hard work and real accomplishment, and lose the meaning of their existence in the bargain. Clay and his friends appear to be following literally the suggestion on a billboard on Sunset Boulevard: "Disappear Here." They have all disappeared into the endless whirl of senseless and meaningless activity. There is just one appropriate word to describe the novel and the story it tells — "sad" — hopelessly, painfully, and awfully sad.

Literary Analysis: Critical Reception and Authorial Intent

If Less Than Zero's narration appears rather deadpan, do not blame it on the writer's youth or inexperience. This style of writing was absolutely intentional, designed to match the flat, monotonous, and almost half-dead life of Clay, his family, and his friends. Their lives were dead not because of a lack of excitement but due to an overdose of it. Life was so relentlessly exciting that the word "excitement" lost all meaning, and monotonous thrills did little to fill the void that everyone felt and no one acknowledged.

When the novel first appeared in 1985, Bret Easton Ellis was only twenty-one years old. His age was one reason the novel was dismissed as a quasi-fictional version of the author's own teenage experiences. Critics went so far as to label Ellis as one of the "brat pack" who was intimately familiar with "the lifestyles of the young and naughty" (Lehman 72). The novel received few favorable reviews, and no one appeared willing to read between the lines and unearth the author's real intention. Ellis was attacked, probably because his fictional depiction of life in Beverly Hills actually resembled the real version of it. Critics assumed it was more autobiography than novel. "You sometimes get the feeling that chunks of this book were lifted whole from the high melodrama and adolescent angst of Ellis's diary," observed one critic (McCarthy 80). Another reviewer claimed that the novel was "almost more interesting as a cultural document than as a novel" (Lehman 70). Even those who felt the author possessed talent maintained that Less Than Zero "ends up feeling more like a '60 Minutes' documentary on desperate youth than a full-fledged novel" (Kakutani). One critic did acknowledge the realism in the work, terming it "a rather juvenile attempt to capture the sense of purposelessness that seems to afflict so many young people these days" (New Republic).

But critics themselves could not agree on why the novel was supposedly worthless. Some felt it was due to excessive literary borrowing — "his descriptions of Los Angeles carry a few too many echoes of Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion and Nathanael West" (Kakutani) — while others felt the novel lacked any literary value: "Reading [the novel] is like watching MTV" (New Republic). Some claimed that the style and tone showed "an obvious indebtedness to … Hemingway" (Salter), while others argued that the novel is "written in the inarticulate style of a petulant suburban punk" (New Republic). One critic maintained that Ellis's characters were a little too real and hoped he would "write a story that doesn't merely depress us with sociological reports" (Kakutani); yet another found nothing real about the characters at all: "Prematurely world-weary, these martyrs of anomie and non-existential alienation go from party to party looking for cheap thrills…" (New Republic).

In short, it was Ellis's youth and not the actual merit of his work that went against him upon publication. Every reviewer probably found Ellis too young to have written a novel of substance, and most people therefore refrained from conducting a close literary analysis. The novel almost fell into oblivion after these first few negative reviews and became even more obscure when Ellis's next work, The Rules of Attraction (1987), also failed to attract critics or readers. But none of that should diminish the real strength of this work as a carefully created and skillfully shaped reflection on the dreadfully empty lives of the rich and young.

Clay as a Psychologically Complex Narrator

Critical comments failed to do justice to the novel, because a close reading reveals it is anything but a shallow rendition of the author's teenage life. Ellis's protagonist, Clay, is not an empty, hollow figure without range or depth. If he appears that way initially, it is because he was meant to resemble all the other rich kids. But the fact that he is capable of noticing the flaws in this lifestyle shows that he possesses the mental depth and psychological range needed to qualify as a worthy narrator. His deadpan style of narrating suggests that he is completely devoid of feelings — or at least tries to suppress them — because real emotions are likely to produce a painful awareness of the nothingness of his life.

A careful reading of two key situations in the novel demonstrates that the narrator is capable of feeling but chooses not to feel. In the first situation, he finds himself in an intimate encounter with a girl but notices the extreme lack of any real intimacy between them:

"The girl and I get into her car and drive off into the hills and we go to her room and I take off my clothes and lie on her bed and she goes into the bathroom and I wait a couple of minutes and then she finally comes out, a towel wrapped around her, and sits on the bed and I put my hands on her shoulders, and she says stop it and, after I let go, she tells me to lean against the headboard and I do… she reaches into the drawer by her bed and brings out a tube of Bain De Soleil and she hands it to me and then she reaches into the drawer and brings out a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses and she tells me to put them on and I do…. She puts a robe on and stares at me. I can hear thunder in the distance and it begins to rain harder. She lights a cigarette and I start to dress. And then I call a cab and finally take the Wayfarers off and she tells me to be quiet walking down the stairs so I won't wake her parents." (Ellis 120–122)

In the second situation, he is with a girl named Blair, who was once his girlfriend. Blair needs to know if Clay has any feelings for her, and his response explains the root of his emotional emptiness:

BLAIR: What do you care about? What makes you happy?
CLAY: Nothing. Nothing makes me happy. I like nothing.
BLAIR: Did you ever care about me, Clay?
CLAY: I don't want to care. If I care about things, it'll just be worse, it'll just be another thing to worry about. It's less painful if I don't care. (205)

All of this suggests that Clay knows something is wrong with his life. But he does not want to question or probe further, since doing so is likely to lead to unwelcome and unflattering answers. For this reason, he chooses to silence his feelings and appears more like a mechanical mannequin that does what everyone else does, because there seems to be no easy way out. This does not mean, however, that the novel carries a non-existentialist theme. Far from it — the protagonist knows and believes that his life is his own making, but he is simply confused as to what could bring an end to the painful hollowness of his existence.

Conclusion: Clay's Decision to Leave

After witnessing all this maliciousness during his Christmas vacation, Clay chooses not to be like the others in his group. He had seen enough and decides that he must leave the scene if he does not want to end up hollow and half-dead like his friends. "These images stayed with me even after I left the city. Images so violent and malicious that they seemed to be my only point of reference for a long time afterwards. After I left" (208). His decision to leave was a sensible one, since it was impossible to remain amid aimlessness and find any meaning or direction. It was the author's way of offering a solution to a problem that had been consuming Clay since he arrived in Los Angeles for his Christmas break. Less Than Zero is not a social commentary on decadent Beverly Hills youth — it is the story of a young, confused person who wants some aim and direction in order to give his life meaning.