DEATH GAMES AND THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY: J. G. BALLARD’S WORLD WAR II FICTIONS

Abstract This article is a discussion of J. G. Ballard’s (semi-)autobiographical war narratives, with a focus on the different textual strategies and processes of signification Ballard employs from his avant-garde novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) to the feverish fictional account of his time in World War II China in “The Dead Time” (1977) and Empire of the Sun (1984) to his more reflective autobiographical texts The Kindness of Women (1990) and Miracles of Life (2008). Ballard’s obsessive repetition of many of the same images attests to the problematics of representation of the tra...