“Institutions that had proved the very basis of our society (the family, the neighbourhood, marriage) cracked and split apart in the face of a new shrill current of desperate selfishness.”
In "The Chance" the world has been occupied by aliens who have implemented a lottery that manipulates human’s innate flaws. Essentially, the winners who participate in the Genetic Lottery get a chance to change their physical bodies to their desired taste. Thus, explores elements of capitalism with the Fastalogians taking advantage of the humans’ yearnings for beauty and youth. Therefore with the potential of enhancing one’s life and body at the expense of the other, society loses its ethics and greed prevails. Thus, the assertion illustrates the broken society that is a dystopia lacking the vital community values.
“They will write with the stupid smugness of middle-class intellectuals, people of moral rectitude who have never seriously placed themselves at risk. They have supported wars they have not fought in, and damned companies they have not had the courage to destroy.”
“War Crimes” focuses on the tendency of the bourgeoisie and conglomerates to exploit ideologies to gain profits. As a critique of a dystopian capitalist society where marketing is synonymous with warfare but at the expense of the consumers. It explores a dystopian society in its extremes concerning capitalism as wealth, life and death go hand in hand. It satirizes how the middle-class profit of capitalism without having to suffer the hardships that keep the market afloat or feasible.
“Our relationship is beyond analysis. It was Bernard, although I prefer to name no names, who suggested that the relationship had a Boy Scout flavour about it.”
“Peeling” addresses dominance and obsession through the unhealthy relationship between the narrator and the female abortionist neighbor. It charts the obsessive sexual impulses of the old man towards his neighbor who offers a helping hand on errands and chores. In the statement, the narrator implies that their relationship according to the named third party Bernard is bizarre but disregards his opinions, as he does not value it. Moreover, the narrator is unreliable as his impulses and actions are questionable in comparison to his claims of Bernard.
