DYSTOPIAN LIVING IN THE NEW DIGITAL AGE IN NICOLA BARKER’S H(A)PPY
DYSTOPIAN LIVING IN THE NEW DIGITAL AGE IN NICOLA BARKER’S H(A)PPY

Summary/Abstract: While projecting the readers into a dystopian future world, Nicola Barker’s novel H(A)PPY (2017) is deeply and poignantly rooted in contemporary life and records the anxieties of our age. As developed in this article, it presents a dystopian way of living in a technologically driven and heavily virtualized reality dominated by monitoring, surveillance and control, leading to conformism and uniformization, depersonalization and detachment, as well as degradation and sickness. These effects are not left without reaction, as the protagonist seeks independence and well-being by means of forms of resistance and escape. The article explores all these interrelated features of the way of living depicted in Barker’s visionary satire, which invites the contemporary individual to reflect (once) more on the potential dehumanizing harm caused by mechanization and technologization.

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