The Decline of the West

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The Decline of the West By Hanif Kureishi The short story ”The Decline of the West” from 2010 written by Hanif Kureishi centers around the forty-five years old father, Mike, who got fired and has to tell it to his family. He finds it very difficult to tell his family the bad news. So bad that he at a point in the story gets suicidal thoughts. The story shows how much capitalism and materialism affect people in a negative way. The title refers to the Collapse at Wall Street back in 2008 where millions of peo-ple from the western world lost a major part of their money and factories were closed and jobs lost. This family is an example of how a stock market crash can affect a family. The story’s setting takes place in the upper class society on the comfortable out-skirts of London, where the father’s role in the family is to be the hard working parent with plenty of responsibilities. There are plenty of things in the text that indicate that the family is in the upper class of the society, because they have a narrow house with five floors and a hyper-shiny elegant dining-room table and other luxurious things. Mike comes early home from the cold weather in Eng-land. He is depressed because he lost his job as a banker, which will cause finan-cial problems in the future. Therefore he cannot supply his family with the mate-rial goods that they demand. They boys complain about their friends at school have bigger homes and the sons point out that their fathers are bosses of record companies. The family’s thirst for the latest products continues to grow, which causes Mike to feel bad about himself as a father. That is the reason he thinks the follow-ing: “How easy it was to fall, and how tempting it was – suddenly would be best – to die (page 3, line 100-103). That sentence worries me, as it tells how much ma-terialism means to us, when love should be the

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