Harsh Perspectives of Youth in Garland’s The Beach :: Garland The Beach Essays

Harsh Perspectives of Youth in Garland’s The Beach  Ã‚  Ã‚   As his narrator, Garland offers us Richard, a less than balanced individual, in possession of a tenuous grip upon reality. He is arrogant and reckless, often believing himself to have nothing left to learn ("Fucking New Guy? ... New to what?" p87) and convinced of his own immortality ("Yea, though I walk through the valley of death I will fear no evil, for I am the evilest motherfucker in the valley" p87) The beach is supposed to represent the highest level of escape attainable, but can only be from the outset a disappointment, because it is already built up in his mind into something unobtainable; "It's silly really. I think I was expecting an . . . ideology or something. A purpose." p96 Richard being the narrative voice, one can logically infer that it is his perspective which is intended by Garland to be representative of the youth culture depicted. My first impression is that the very fact that Richard commits his story to text is indicative of a desperate need for recognition, and his style of narration suggests that its writing is not likely to be meant as a catharsis. As a character, he is shallow and self-glorifying beyond the point to which readers might sympathise with his reckless actions: p163 "Collecting ... experiences was my primary goal when I first started travelling. I went about it in the same way as a stamp-collector goes about collecting stamps ... Then I had to graduate to the more obscure stuff. Being in a riot was something I pursued with a truly obsessive zeal, along with being tear-gassed and hearing gunshots fired in anger." The cultural phenomenon of travelling, as distinct from tourism, is one reserved for domination almost exclusively by youth. In Richard's mind, as in others, it becomes the acquisition of experiences with only slight moral differentiation between them, merely a reinforcement in the mind of the collector of their own broadening life perspective; a form of validation which, whilst owing nothing to established mainstream cultural value systems, replaces these with a generation-created classification hierarchy which is just as strict. Established value systems provide the catalyst for tensions within the group, which emerge at the earliest stages immediately upon Richard's arrival: "There's only five people with Walkmans in the camp, and I've refused all of them batteries in the past.