An Enemy Deep: Spectacular Addiction in Hubert Selby's Requiem for a Dream

According to Sadie Plant in Writing on Drugs, the "addict" as an identity emerged in the late nineteenth century as an outsider, a "figment[] of a modern imagination that needed to define its own normality, drawing the boundaries around the upright, productive, and reproductive members of twentieth-century society" (164). [...] Sara consumes both food and television in an effort to stave off loneliness but enters the dangerous world of amphetamine addiction instead, which leads her to develop schizophrenia and lands her in a mental institution.