Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 17

The Limits of Narcissism

13

They closed in for the kill. And then they killed
him. He couldn't remember whether he had died
while he was still standing in line outside, before the
door to Central Booking opened, or while he was in
the pens. But by the time he left the building, he had
died and been reborn-----In his new incarnation, the
press was no longer an enemy, and it was no longer out
there. The press was now a condition . . . . His entire
central nervous system was now wired into the vast,
incalculable circuit of radio and television and
newspapers, and his body surged and burned and
hummed with the energy of the press and the
prurience of those it reached, which was everyone . . .
. By the thousands, no, the millions, they now came
scampering into the cavity of what he had presumed
to be his self, Sherman McCoy (512-13).

"It's damned sobering, how fast it goes when it goes,"
he said to Killian." . . . it's all a thread. Tommy, all
these ties that make up your life . . . . I feel so sorry
for my daughter, my little girl. She'll mourn me,
she'll mourn her daddy, the daddy she remembers,
without knowing he's already dead" (550).
Killian, the novel's most thoroughgoing materialist, has no
idea what Sherman is talking about, but, for the reader, the
significance of this "death" should be quite clear: both the narcissist
and the moralist within him have expired, overrun and trampled by
the public swarm within the cavity of self.
And yet, significantly, Sherman's postmortem selfassessments also reflect the varying definitions of self that Wolfe
provides in the novel—the inviolable private space on the one hand
and the cavity occupied by the community on the other. So it is that,
while reflecting upon his own demise, Sherman can also regard
himself still as the most im[>ortant occupant of the cavity, one who is
still free enough to reflect upon the options left to him. There are few