Crash leads readers on an exploration through a land of dystopian modernity, with its bleak man-made landscapes. It highlights the psychological effects of technological, social, and environmental developments, through a type of “personal hauntedness." This "hauntedness", Ballard states, is “ the complete confinement in [one’s] own panicky universe, yet at the same time open to all kinds of experiences from the outer world” (123).
Through focus on sexual fetishism in connection to automobile accidents, the novel encompasses a reoccurring metaphor: the effect on human desires in connection to the technological society they have been produced in. For Ballad, sex is a symbol of the “the ecstasies of head-on collisions” (15) Yet, Ballard’s intention seems to stretch well beyond this metaphor. He gives his reader no moral compass or timeline in which the events throughout the novel are happening, and in this way, the reader themselves become the spectators.
Ballard wants his readers to wander, like the characters, through the endless field of mundane, deviant strains of our personalities and the process in realizing them. Our only guide seems to come through the perspective of a character, who views the world almost through the lens of a camera: the images are presented in a particular space that cannot be expanded. Within this limited vision, the reader receives information in an input/output method of the series of events taking place. This relates to Ballard’s idea of the individual's loss of imagination in the "artificial horizon"; We are simply “holding [our] position in the spotlight as if waiting for invisible television cameras to frame [us] (88).
The character of Ballard depicts Vaughan as a symbol representing technology, and he “senses that Vaughan was controlling us all, giving each of us what we most wanted and most feared” (96).Marooned on a traffic island, the characters operate as machines of their own invention. Their goal is to test the boundaries of human limitlessness and limitation, through a non-subjective and formulaic procedure of thinking.
So, is Crash a comedy or a tragedy? It is neither. Using a word that Ballard’s character repeats in descriptions of things, it is a “parody”. Fragmented and precise detailed images are placed into a formless structure. This is the main component of this carefully constructed universe: not to reveal the entire picture, but allow the reader to read between the colliding spaces, that intersect and disconnect over and over again. We are left trying to solve an imaginary equation, where the answer is cluttered by real numbers. By deconstructing a formula of sex, and car crashes, Ballard leads readers to no end point, but into the center of his colliding fragments. This establishes the idea that in modern society we are traveling in a never-ending paradox of the “electric highway of technology”, where it becomes “difficult to know where the centre of [the] personality is” (115). Here, the creation of ideas are only mirror images of imitation, and we truly have “entered an immense traffic jam” (151), where our ending and beginning are one in the same thing.
In Crash the readers are the test subjects of Ballard’s madman invention. To what extent is our analysis relevant to discovering Ballard’s true intention in writing Crash? It isn’t. His intention may be only to create a mirror that shows us we may be the spectators of our masked disguises. He presents our own strengths and weaknesses, through what may be considered "unlikeable" characters that we have always kept our eyes closed to.Here, in this technological society, sex images must be removed from the human body that gives them meaning. Ballard captivates our longing to discover what impact we truly make in a digital society, where realities truth is shoved in our face to speculate. At the end of the novel, we can only watch from our generic distance that technology has created. The collisions in time and space that continuously occur may remain a mystery in this technological landscape of the mind.
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