Consumerism and reflections of violence in Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club and James Graham Ballard's millennium people and kingdom come

Today, consumerism as a new life-style, propels societies into consumption, eroding the conventional social morality of societies, and the cultural and natural destruction caused by this consumption tolls the death knell for humanity. Consumerism puts the consumption culture in to the centre of civilization and social life, as the main activity for pleasure, creating phony perceptions of happiness and freedom. However, those who do not have adequate free time and financial sources for consumption are isolated in this consumer culture. People who are deprived of consumption opportunities gravitate towards violence, crime, pornography and addictions as alternatives to consumption. These inequalities, which cause conflicts between the social strata that are classified according to their product choice, not only pave way to social disintegration, but also to the annihilation of civilisation. The hazards of consumerism, which have been criticised by many thinkers such as Baudrillard, Badiou, Bocock, Bauman and Zizek, has also inspired many literary works of prominent writers in the world. The aim of this study is to scrutinize consumerism and the reflection of violence in the novels Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk and Millennium People and Kingdom Come by James Graham Ballard. Due to the striking parallelism between Fight Club and Millennium People in terms of characterization and plot, these novels have been analyzed comparatively.