“The weigh[t] like a nightmare in the brains of the living”: Postmodernism, the Spectacle and Radical Adolescence in Shirley Jackson’s “The Intoxicated”

By Ana Ibáñez Cirauqui

Ana Ibáñez Cirauqui, born in Navarra, Spain, is a dedicated scholar and educator. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Modern Languages: Literature, Culture, Linguistics, and Translation at the Universidad de Alcalá, while simultaneously completing a Master's degree in Education. Her doctoral research explores Shirley Jackson’s work through the lens of matrophobia, examining complex intersections of gender, familial dynamics, and
societal anxieties in literature.
Bridging academic theory with classroom practice, Ana currently works as an English teacher, applying her background in literary studies to her pedagogy. Her critical foundation was established during her Bachelor’s degree in English Studies at the
Universidad de Salamanca and further honed through a specialized module in English Teaching in the Classroom at the University of Wales, Bangor. She also holds a Master's degree in Research in Contemporary Anglophone and Hispanic Literatures from the Universidad de Alcalá.
Ana has actively contributed to academic discourse by participating in various conferences, most notably Fantásticas e Insólitas at the Universidad de Alcalá, a conference dedicated to speculative fiction and women writers. There, she delivered a lecture on Shirley Jackson, aligning with her thesis focus.

“Writing has never been capitalism's thing. Capitalism is profoundly illiterate.”--Deleuze and Guattari

Capitalism may produce endless images, but as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, it is structurally illiterate. Hostile to critical language and resistant to memory, capitalism is allergic to any utterance that does not serve accumulation. It replaces narrative with spectacle, discourse with repetition, and historical consciousness with market cycles. In Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Intoxicated,” published in 1949, we encounter a brief yet clear disruption of that illiteracy. A seventeen-year-old girl named Eileen articulates, with stoic calm, the end of a world built on these illusions. Her voice cuts through the ideological fog of postwar domesticity and consumer optimism, unsettling a middle-aged man who is both literally and symbolically intoxicated. What begins as a casual kitchen conversation becomes a confrontation between competing temporalities, languages, and political positions: one aligned with the inertia of the spectacle, the other with its possible collapse.

As the man attempts to engage Eileen with casual paternalism, the conversation quickly shifts. Eileen begins to articulate a vision of future societal collapse with unsettling clarity: schools sinking mid-lesson, churches crumbling and magazines abandoned in the rubble. Eileen’s insistence that “if only you could know exactly what minute it will come” (Jackson 7) conveys a lucidity that unsettles the adult’s intoxicated detachment. Her tone is neither confused nor hysterical. Rather, it is measured, even purpose driven. The adult, numbed by alcohol and immersed in the ideological comforts of postwar life, finds himself unable to respond. His worldview—rooted in consumer stability, gendered condescension and Cold War indifference—is incompatible with the discourse Eileen introduces. As she speaks, his tools for interpretation fail. He dismisses her concerns with references to “movie magazines” (Jackson 7), seeking to relocate her voice within a trivial, commodified script of a ‘teenage’ identity she refuses to personify.

What unfolds in “The Intoxicated” is more than a generational disagreement; it is a compressed allegory of ideological disjunction. Jackson stages a conflict between two historically situated modes of subjectivity: one dulled by the spectacle of commodities and conformity, the other sharpened by the necessity of active consciousness. The story becomes a site of epistemological rupture, in which the dominant logic of meaning, time, and identity is momentarily unsettled by a voice that speaks from outside the spectacle. This essay argues that Eileen represents a rupture in the chain of meaning and production within the postmodern social order, both inside and outside “The Intoxicated.” Echoing the radical clarity of 1930s youth movements such the National Student League (NSL), Eileen offers a counterpoint to the passivity encouraged by consumer society, embodied by the intoxicated adult protagonist. Her speech interrupts the late capitalist world of images with a lucidity that resists commodification and escapes symbolic containment. Drawing on historical materials on student political consciousness in the 1930s and 1940s, alongside Fredric Jameson’s work Postmodernism and the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, this essay situates Jackson’s story within a broader visionary framework of cultural and ideological struggle over the meaning of youth, agency, and resistance. It reads Eileen not simply as a precocious visionary character, but as a literary echo of a submerged political history—one whose voice continues to haunt the ideological structures of the present.

The American Teenager as Political Subject, Postmodernism and the Spectacle

The cultural tension at the center of Shirley Jackson’s “The Intoxicated” (1949) cannot be fully grasped without first considering the dramatic transformations that redefined adolescence and political agency in the United States between the Great Depression and the postwar boom. The collapse of 1929 exposed the fragility of American capitalism and shattered the illusion of perpetual prosperity that had dominated the 1920s. Mass unemployment, housing insecurity, and widespread hunger eroded trust in the promises of liberal individualism and upward mobility. Although the New Deal provided sweeping reforms, its solutions remained partial as it left underlying class hierarchies intact and excluded many collectives—especially women, Black Americans, and immigrants—from its promises.

In this environment of crisis, young people became politically active in new and forceful ways. For many working-class students, the Depression became a crucible of politicization. Organizations like the National Student League (NSL) helped transform youthful frustration into coordinated action through strikes, literature, and open debate. As Robert Cohen has shown, the NSL and similar organizations did more than react to collapse; they theorized it. They produced manifestos and pamphlets that interpreted personal hardship in the language of class struggle, embedding youthful frustration within a wider materialist analysis of state repression and capitalist exploitation (Cohen 25). In this context, adolescence was reimagined not as a passive stage of social preparation but as an active site of historical agency.

In the 1930s, youth came to be seen as politically potent. Adolescence was not a passive stage of labor formation but a site of historical agency. The cultural imagination of the period reflected this shift: young people were represented not as rebellious consumers but as critical actors, capable of articulating systemic alternatives. However, this vision of youth as radical subjectivity would not survive unchallenged. By the late 1940s and 1950s, a different conception of adolescence gained dominance. With the expansion of consumer capitalism, youth was increasingly marketed as a lifestyle and an economic category rather than a political identity — a shift that intensified in the immediate postwar years. During this period, rising household incomes, suburban growth, and the proliferation of mass media cultivated teenagers as a lucrative consumer subject. Jon Savage has observed that the term "teenager" itself was a marketing invention, designed from the beginning to monetize adolescent spending power (xii). Commercial media such as films, magazines, music or fashion curated adolescence as a zone of consumption. The very figure of the teenager was thus a product. It became stylized rebellion packaged for commercial circulation.

At the same time, Cold War nationalism and anti-communist conformity narrowed the boundaries of acceptable public discourse. Ideological pressures promoted suburban domesticity, rigid gender roles, and patriotic duty which depoliticized youth culture. The politically engaged student of the 1930s was replaced by a stylized figure of pseudo-rebellion: a teenager sold back to themselves through images, trends, and products. Adolescence became a managed identity, offering the illusion of individuality through consumer choice while neutralizing possibilities for critique. It is precisely this cultural shift, from youth as political agent to youth as commodified image, that Jackson dramatizes in “The Intoxicated.” Situated at the threshold between these two historical formations, the story stages a confrontation between a drunken adult steeped in ‘pastiche’ consumer logic and an adolescent whose radical clarity refuses the ideological scripts offered to her. Jackson’s brief narrative becomes a microcosm of a larger historical rupture. That is, the passage from the politically conscious youth of the 1930s to the commodified, depoliticized consumer adolescent identity that dominated the postwar era.

Likewise, to understand this historical rupture more deeply, it is helpful to frame Jackson’s story through the retrospective lens of postmodernism. Although Shirley Jackson wrote “The Intoxicated” in 1949—that is, long before the term “postmodernism” gained traction—her story dramatizes conditions that Fredric Jameson would later theorize in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Jameson argues that in late capitalism, culture is no longer simply influenced by economic logic but fully subsumed into it. “Postmodernism,” he writes, “is inseparable from [...] some fundamental mutation of the sphere of culture [...] which includes a momentous modification of its social function” (47). In other words, Jameson is saying that culture no longer functions as an autonomous sphere of expression or critique but becomes an extension of capitalist production itself. Subjectivity, aesthetics, and even temporality become extensions of the commodity form; an extra layer of consumable goods. Beneath the glossy surfaces of late capitalist culture lies its brutal underside: “blood, torture, death, and terror” (6). This cultural transformation is not limited to the economic sphere; it produces a deep shift in aesthetic experience and symbolic life. Under late capitalism, representation itself becomes unstable, no longer rooted in coherent histories or expressive intent. It is within this symbolic environment that postmodern culture exhibits the rise of "pastiche."

Postmodernism is characterized by the collapse of expressive depth. This profundity is replaced by "pastiche," a “blank parody, [...] a statue with blind eyeballs” (17). Identity and emotion, once grounded in narrative and memory, are reified into consumable signs. In this context, even the self becomes image: “the image has become the final form of commodity reification” (18). Here, Jameson means that even identity and subjectivity themselves are commodified, reduced to marketable images that circulate independently of real social relations. While this transformation might seem totalizing, Jameson notes that culture has not disappeared, it has exploded into all areas of life, saturating even “the very structure of the psyche itself” (48). This saturation, however, often immobilizes us “under the impenetrable fog of historical inevitability” (47). This means that capitalism has absorbed culture so completely into everyday life that it now shapes even our inner thoughts and emotions, leaving individuals feeling powerless to imagine history, or themselves, as capable of change.

This takes us to the next trait of postmodern culture, and that is its treatment of history as style. The past is not remembered but repackaged, producing what Jameson terms "pop history." This aestheticized nostalgia signals “the waning of our historicity,” revealing a cultural inability “to fashion representations of our own current experience” (21). The result is a disconnect between collective memory and lived reality. As Jameson notes, “There no longer does seem to be any organic relationship between the American history we learn from schoolbooks and the lived experience” (22). This symptom, tied to the “increasing primacy of the ‘neo,’” and the nostalgic effect, ultimately reflects a culture addicted to the spectacle of time rather than its substance (18). This observation underscores how Jackson’s story anticipates the commodified temporality of late capitalism.

Finally, Jameson’s analysis finds its sharpest literary echo in the figure of "the teenager," a subject invented by consumer culture as an image of rebellion that obscures its lack of agency. Mass media offers youth prefabricated identities: styles, moods, even gestures, all of which conceal “the end of the distinctive individual brush stroke” (15) and the “waning of affect” (11). Figures like Marilyn Monroe, he notes, are “transformed into their own images” (11), icons without referents. In “The Intoxicated,” Eileen resists this script. Her speech interrupts the commodified image of youth and points toward a lost historical consciousness. She is not a stylized subject of spectacle, but what the spectacle works to suppress: a teenager who speaks rather than performs.

Of course, Jameson wrote decades after Jackson, and applying his framework to a 1949 story risks anachronism. Yet this risk can be productive if acknowledged. Jackson’s text does not emerge from a postmodern culture, but it anticipates many of the cultural logics Jameson describes. In the intoxicated adult, Jackson dramatizes a subjectivity flattened by consumer images and pastiche; whereas in Eileen, she stages a refusal of this logic through visionary unsettling clarity. Postmodernism, when applied retrospectively, becomes a diagnostic tool, highlighting how “The Intoxicated” foreshadows the cultural transformations of late capitalism.

Finally, if Jameson provides one perspective on the saturation of culture by late capitalism, Guy Debord offers another through his theory of the spectacle. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord argues that modern life is increasingly dominated by appearances rather than lived experience. Published in 1967 but deeply rooted in Marxist critiques of alienation and reification, Debord's theory clarifies how the logic of the spectacle dominates everyday life, transforming both social relations and individual consciousness into appearances separated from reality. The spectacle is not simply a collection of visuals but a “social relation among people, mediated by images” (Debord 2). Under late capitalism, images no longer reflect life, they replace it: “The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images” (11). Debord means that capitalism no longer just produces material goods; it increasingly produces images, signs, and appearances that structure how we perceive reality itself. In this transformation, capital abandons its material form and reappears as signs, appearances, and consumable identities. What once existed as direct, lived relationships, that is labor, identity, or political life, is now encountered primarily through representations. 

Expanding Marx’s theory of the fetishism of the commodity, Debord states that consumable goods “attain [their] ultimate fulfillment in the spectacle, where the real world is replaced by a selection of images […] which succeed in making themselves regarded as the epitome of reality” (14). This process is not merely symbolic, it is epistemological. The spectacle reframes the real as representational, turning ideological projections into unquestioned truth. This “fetishism of the commodity” is the main mechanism behind the spectacle’s most powerful effect, its production of passivity. The citizen becomes a spectator, distanced from political and social life, encouraged only to observe, never to intervene. As Debord explains, the spectacle “presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality [...] its sole message is: what appears is good; what is good appears” (4). In other words, the spectacle discourages questioning by presenting its images as self-evident truths. Within this framework, action becomes consumption, and thinking is replaced by recognition. This passivity is especially salient in postwar culture, where consumer abundance masked deep political repression. “The modern spectacle,” Debord writes, “depicts what society could deliver, but in so doing it rigidly separates what is possible from what is permitted” (8). That is, individuals were given simulations of choice and freedom, but only within the limits set by capital. They were not allowed to dissent in any way. The spectacle did its part in keeping people entertained, and whenever this was not enough, the state did the rest. Debord also emphasizes that the spectacle’s logic fragments social life. Even as it offers simulated collectivity—mass media, suburban living, shared rituals—it isolates individuals from each other. Spectators, he writes, are “linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other" (10). Social bonds are weakened, replaced by shared exposure to images rather than shared experiences. 

In this fragmented world, the teenager becomes both a product and symbol of spectacle culture. Debord’s insight that “the spectacle is the culmination of the domination of society by both intangible and tangible things” (14) is nowhere more evident than in teen culture, where emotion, rebellion, and identity are transformed into purchasable expressions. “The spectacle keeps people in a state of unconsciousness,” Debord warns, “as they pass through practical changes in their conditions of existence” (8). This dynamic is especially visible in the prefabricated figure of the teenager, whose stylized identity displaces any political consciousness. Debord’s framework, though articulated in 1967, illuminates how Jackson’s story dramatizes the spectacle’s early forms. The intoxicated adult embodies a subjectivity already colonized by appearances, while Eileen voices a refusal that the spectacle cannot fully contain. By placing Jackson’s story within this framework, we can see it not as an anachronistic application of later theory but as a narrative that anticipates and dramatizes the conditions Debord would later diagnose.

Together, Jameson and Debord offer retrospective but illuminating perspectives. Jackson’s story, situated in the late 1940s, captures the tensions of a society moving from Depression-era radical youth toward Cold War consumer adolescence. The adult and Eileen embody opposing logics: one of commodified compliance, the other of disruptive clarity. By reading the story through these frameworks, we can appreciate it not only as a generational dialogue but as an early literary meditation on the cultural logics of late capitalism. What follows is a close reading of the text considering this framework, tracing how Jackson encodes passivity, dissonance, and historical memory.

The old world dying, the new world struggling to be born

To begin with the analysis of the dynamics within the story, the adult protagonist in “The Intoxicated” is presented as a paradoxical figure whose subjectivity is shaped by pastiche, intoxication, and the spectacle’s mediation of everyday life. He cannot meet Eileen’s radical voice on its own terms. Instead, his perceptions are filtered through the cultural clichés of adolescence inherited from the media, and his speech demonstrates the passivity and repetition that Guy Debord and Fredric Jameson diagnose in their analyses of late capitalist culture.

From the outset, he trivializes Eileen’s clarity by directing her toward trivialities: she should be reading “movie magazines” instead of speaking about catastrophe (Jackson 5). This condescending dismissal exemplifies Debord’s claim that the spectacle demands passive acceptance: “The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply” (Debord 4). The adult treats Eileen not as a subject but as a teenager-image to be managed, a role already scripted by consumer media. His words do not emerge from genuine dialogue but from the prefabricated representations that structure his view of youth. His most telling refrain is: “In my day… girls thought of nothing but cocktails and necking” (Jackson 5). This line, repeated with heavy emphasis, is not a memory in depth but what Jameson calls “pastiche” or “blank parody” (Jameson 17). It reduces adolescence to a cultural stereotype, stripping it of history or substance. As Jameson notes, postmodern culture tends to reconstruct the past as “ideas and stereotypes” (22) rather than as lived reality. The adult’s words enact this precisely: his “day” is not remembered but performed as pastiche, an empty echo of cultural scripts that cannot register Eileen’s disruptive difference.

The man’s intoxication accentuates his passivity. Alcohol dulls his responses, leaving him unable to confront Eileen’s clarity. His drunkenness exemplifies what Debord describes as the passive subject of the spectacle, that is, a figure so thoroughly colonized by commodified perception that alternative modes of meaning, or memory are no longer available to him. As Debord writes, “the spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life. Commodification is not only visible, we cannot see anything else; the world we see is the world of the commodity” (16). This man does not merely consume goods, he consumes a reality shaped entirely by commodity logic, where every exchange—social, aesthetic, even emotional—is mediated by the object-form. The man’s interaction with Eileen reflects this fundamentally limited perspective. He fails to grasp the content of her discourse not because it is inherently lucid, but because his identity is so thoroughly alienated that her dissension reads as confusion. He occupies a position of “consumable survival,” in Debord’s terms, a zone of expanded life that, paradoxically, remains grounded in deprivation. “If augmented survival never comes to a resolution,” Debord writes, “it is because it is stuck in the realm of privation. It may gild poverty, but it cannot transcend it” (17). The man’s drunken detachment and indulgent irony are not signs of depth, but symptoms of modern passivity. They are a way of enduring the spectacle by surrendering to its cycles of hollow pleasure and emotional disengagement.

This passivity is aesthetically coded as well. His worldview is shaped by a postmodern condition in which originality and agency have eroded. Jameson’s notion of the "waning of affect" (15) applies directly. He means that in postmodern culture, emotions lose depth and become stylized gestures.  The adult character no longer exhibits the emotional interiority of the bourgeois ego, but instead embodies a flattened, depersonalized mode of being. The waning of affect  “means the end of much more,” Jameson writes, “the end of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal" (15). He is not a tragic figure, but a cultural placeholder, an emblem of a self dissolved into spectacle. Even his conversational style is implicated in this logic. He flattens Eileen’s existential critique into absurdity and casually redirects her to “read movie magazines” (7), displacing any opening toward analysis with a gesture toward spectacle. This follows the line of Debord’s statement, “the passive acceptance it [the Spectacle] demands is already effectively imposed by […] its manner of appearing without allowing any reply” (4). His role, then, is not to converse but to reflect, like a screen, only what the spectacle permits him to see: surface, irony, and consumption.

Consequently, his alienation is not exceptional but structurally produced. As Jameson notes, postmodern aesthetic production is now fully integrated into capitalist production itself, with “a frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods" (4). Just as the historical novel "cannibalizes" the past in a play of hollow references, so too does the adult in Jackson’s story speak in clichés, drawing from a repository of prefabricated attitudes. The “play of random stylistic allusion,” Jameson observes, “is at least compatible with addiction” (18), a word that resonates strongly with the man’s literal intoxication and deeper ideological dependency. The drunk protagonist of the story is never capable of understanding and reading Eileen, as he is only mediating with her through images (Debord 2). It is not the real Eileen right there in front of him that he is talking to, but to that perfected mirage and commodified “youth-capital” (86) of the teenager. This aligns with Jameson’s argument of linguistic fragmentation. In social life, verbal interactions are “reduced to a neutral and reified media speech” (Jameson 16). Their own voice is fragmented, turned over new trends of communication. Everything is mediated by the media. 
Just as the category of the teenager emerged during the story’s setting, so too does the spectacular necessity of “youth-capital"--not in the carpe diem sense, in which youth must make the most of time as death is always near, but in a consumable sphere. In spectacular time, the idea of death has disappeared. Life is for being on top of the possession chain. If you are not grab hold of the latest illusion (Debord 86), the new “novel-seeming goods,” (Jameson 4) you do not have place in social life. That is why the protagonist urges Eileen to consume her life as the spectacle dictates. The man’s nostalgic refrain reveals his inability to perceive Eileen’s critique:

"It’s really a frightening time when a girl sixteen has to think of things like that.” In my day, he thought of saying mockingly, girls thought of nothing but cocktails and necking. […] “There’s a terrible difference,” she said. “In my day,” he said, overemphasizing, “girls thought of nothing but cocktails and necking.” (Jackson 5)

The protagonist knows what current teenagers should be doing and it does not include critical thinking. The spectacle thus proves its triumph by reuniting “the separated only in their separateness” (10). That is, cutting everyone according to the same pattern.

Thus, the adult is a sort of a "proto-postmodern" man. His intoxication marks him as passive, his clichés align him with spectacle logic, and his speech exemplifies Jameson’s pastiche. At the same time, his insistence on “his day” exposes the emptiness of this identity, a past that was never truly lived but already mediated. Jackson presents him not as a tragic figure but as a cultural type: a man whose subjectivity is dissolved into spectacle, incapable of recognizing the disruptive voice before him. In this context, Eileen’s discourse in “The Intoxicated” becomes more than a literary anomaly. It is a voice uncontained by the spectacle, a figure not yet fully subsumed by commodified time.

Following Debord’s lines, “the owners of history have given time a direction, a direction which is also a meaning” (71). In contrast to the anonymous protagonist of the story, Eileen has a mind like an arrow. It shoots and strikes far away from their current time and space. She knows what kind of future waits for future generations, that is, a future of catastrophe. When Debord argues about the ownership of history, he is not referring to common folk like Eileen, but to the “ruling class” (72), that is, the owners of goods. He argues that, in “becoming specialists” of owning things they become themselves possessed by them, in this case, time and history. They are forced to justify a linear timeline in which the current “new immobility within history” is "the best of the possible worlds" (Debord 78). Nevertheless, the only owner of time and history is the global market.  As Debord argues, “With the development of capitalism, irreversible time has become globally unified. […] This unified irreversible time belongs to the global market, and thus also to the global spectacle” (79). What Debord is saying here is that capitalism has standardized the experience of time itself, turning it into a universal rhythm of production and consumption governed by the market. In this context, Eileen’s refusal to accept this market-owned temporality marks the beginning of her disruption. Unlike the adult protagonist, Eileen does not inhabit history as an inheritance, but as something to be dismantled. She does not buy the historical cycle of consumerism. She does not look longingly at the past, like her counterpart does. Instead, she looks at the future with subversive eyes. “‘Things will be different afterward,’ she said. ‘Everything that makes the world like it is now will be gone. We’ll have new rules and new ways of living’” (Jackson 5). She almost foreshadows the forthcoming age of consumerism and the consequent doom for society. 

Moreover, the dissent Eileen articulates in her speech, the clarity with which she sees that “the trouble” is that all the previous generations fell for the commodification of their "own time" and history is what makes her a less alienated subject: “If people had been really, honestly scared when you were young, we wouldn’t be so badly off today” (Jackson 5). She does not see history as a justification of their own lifestyle but of their own decadence. If history was a speech, which indeed, it is, she is a Lacanian schizophrenic that breaks that very chain of meaning and sense and offers a counternarrative: the eventual decadence of their way of life, the cataclysmic end of consumerism. She speaks with startling lucidity: 

“Somehow, I think of the churches as going first, before even the Empire State building. And then all the big apartment houses by the river, slipping down slowly into the water with the people inside. And the schools […] The subways will crash through, you know, and the little magazine stands will all be squashed. […] The office buildings will be just piles of broken stones she said, her wide emphatic eyes still looking at him. “If only you could know exactly what minute it will come.” (Jackson 6-7)

What Eileen envisions here is not mere destruction but the collapse of the very institutions that sustain capitalist order, a vision that transforms her apocalyptic imagery into a critique of systemic decay rather than a fantasy of chaos.

Nevertheless, while Eileen’s apocalyptic clarity marks her as a figure who resists the dominant historical narrative and consumer temporality, her dissent goes beyond content; it is also structural. She does not merely reject the future imagined by the spectacle; she refuses the very language through which that future is legitimized. The rupture she embodies is not only temporal but also semiotic. It is in this sense that Eileen becomes more than a rebellious teenager. She becomes a subject who speaks outside the ideological script, interrupting the smooth circulation of meaning that sustains late capitalist order.

Lacan describes schizophrenia as a “breakdown in the signifying chain, that is, the interlocking syntagmatic series of signifiers which constitutes an utterance or a meaning” (Jameson 26). That means that, for Lacan, schizophrenia disrupts the normal flow of language and meaning, breaking the connections that allow ideas to form coherent narratives. In this sense, Eileen breaks the signifying chain of late capitalist cultural logic and history. She does not see her present as something inevitable, but rather as something to change. She interrupts the "images-based" discourse of the anonymous protagonist. She is not only beyond his preconception of teenager, but also beyond his cultural knowledge and linguistic repertoire. He can only imagine her identity through clichés, “'ask her about boys? basketball?’ but Eileen resists, replying with a curt, “Play basketball? No'” (Jackson 4).

She is also able to look out of his spectacle-based mirage. “Do you like parties?” (Jackson 5) she asks the man. She does this almost in an ironic tone, as if there was no choice between liking them or not: “Her tone had been faintly surprised, as though next he were to declare for an arena with gladiators fighting wild beasts” (5). This follows the line of Debord’s argument with the waning of community:

Although the present age presents itself as a series of frequently recurring festivities, it is an age that knows nothing of real festivals. The moments within cyclical time when members of a community joined together in a luxurious expenditure of life are impossible for a society that lacks both community and luxury. Its vulgarized pseudo festivals are parodies of real dialogue and gift giving; they may incite waves of excessive economic spending, but they lead to nothing but disillusionments, which can be compensated only by the promise of some new disillusion to come. […] The reality of time has been replaced by the publicity of time. (84)

What Debord is saying here is that capitalist society replaces genuine communal experiences with empty spectacles of celebration, events that simulate togetherness but ultimately serve only to perpetuate consumption and maintain social passivity. As we have seen in the drunk man’s analysis, just like with the publicity of teenager and the spectacle, the man also tries to influence Eileen with this “publicity of time” (Debord 84) F.or Debord, the “publicity of time” refers to the fictional packaging of festivities as sites for community. In this sense, these festivals are parodies of real social interactions masked behind the attractions of inebriation through alcohol and other spectacular opiates. The drunk man, in this light, acts as an unwitting mouthpiece of that narrative, attempting to steer Eileen away from rupture and back toward the spectacle’s indulgences. Yet this effort momentarily falters: “‘You sound nice and sober,’ he said” (Jackson 4). He immediately realizes the inappropriateness of the remark in a fleeting moment of clarity that punctures his depressive hedonia (Fisher 21). Nevertheless, the insight dissolves as quickly as it appears, and he returns to the party’s empty cheer, attempting once again to draw Eileen into its shallow pleasures (Jackson 5).

In this context, Eileen’s character emerges as a powerful counter-image. In contrast to the postwar teenager constructed by the culture industry, she articulates a deeply rational, politically aware discourse. Her refusal to accept the commodified future offered by the adult protagonist places her in stark opposition to the spectacular teenager of late capitalist media. She acknowledges the temporality of commodified passing goods, arguing that once this society has crashed their value will plummet. Everyone will be able to access them once the system inevitably falls: “You’ll be able to pick up all the candy bars you want, and magazines, and lipsticks and artificial flowers from the five-and-ten, and dresses lying in the street from all the big stores. And fur coats” (Jackson 6–7). She vividly imagines them — candy bars, magazines, lipstick, dresses, fur coats — with an almost enticing level of detail. Her speech shows that she knows and even values these consumer objects but places them in the context of collapse where they lose their structured market value. Her vision acknowledges the fascination commodities hold but reframes them within her counter-narrative of collapse. As we argued before, she does not reply to the protagonist’s simple and prejudicial questions about boys or her hobbies. She is stoic in her answers, setting distance from her real self and the ‘image’ society has sold about her new social category, that is, “teenagers” (Cosgrove). She declares herself not as the fake reference of the image of the teenager but as an independent subject. She stops the conversation between images, that is, the fake construction of this new social category, and the drunk man's perception of her through these images. Paraphrasing Debord, the only accepted narrative is that shown in "the show" (8). What the spectacle depicts is only a new social group, capable of a newly visible spending power (Savage XII) and she does not only reject that, but also stands outside of the consumer world itself, she embodies the counternarrative. 

This counternarrative is why Jackson’s portrayal of Eileen resonates powerfully with the political subjectivity cultivated by the youth movements of the 1930s, particularly the National Student League. Although Eileen does not explicitly name political systems, her age, tone, and discursive clarity evoke the kind of historically situated adolescent voice that emerged from Depression-era radical student culture. Eileen’s articulation of systemic collapse, delivered with eerie “wide emphatic eyes” (Jackson 5) and intellectual poise, bears striking resemblance to the voices of the NSL's early members. Like many young radicals of the 1930s, she speaks from the margins of adult power with a tone that is neither hysterical nor immature but grounded in moral seriousness. As Cohen writes, “the NSL grew out of the frustrations and aspirations of working-class students who were deeply politicized by the Great Depression” (5). These were not elite revolutionaries; they were high school students whose lived realities made critical consciousness not just possible, but necessary. Eileen’s rebuke, “if people had been really, honestly scared when you were young, we wouldn’t be so badly off today” (Jackson 5) directly echoes this ethos, casting adult complacency as the root of crisis. As Cohen puts it, “these were adolescents coming of age in a time when social catastrophe made radical thought feel like realism, not extremism” (4). Eileen’s matter-of-fact pronouncement that “everything that makes the world like it is now will be gone” (Jackson 7) echoes this ethos. She does not speculate, she diagnoses. Her apocalyptic tone is less about fantasy than about historical literacy, an awareness of systemic limits that recalls the NSL’s grounded rhetoric of critique.

Following this line, Eileen’s voice is not revolutionary in a strict sense. Her steadiness, like that of many NSL members, signals not a rejection of political engagement, but a refusal to offer false hope. As Cohen notes, “the NSL was neither blindly revolutionary nor timidly reformist—it combined a moral urgency with political restraint” (13) This dual stance, a blend of critique and caution, defines Eileen’s discourse. She does not offer a path forward, nor does she cling to messianic ideals, she simply outlines, with clarity and precision, what is already unraveling. Her vision is transitional in the truest sense, suspended between critique and action, awareness and alienation. This is not a utopian stance, but a historically grounded one. As Cohen emphasizes, “their vision was grounded, not in dreamy abstraction, but in the concrete experiences of economic hardship and social exclusion” (102). Eileen's insights emerge not from naïveté, but from proximity to rupture, a kind of spectral memory of earlier youth radicalism, refracted through the lens of postwar ideological repression. In this way, Eileen exists not only as a literary character, but a symbolic residue of youth as a political force. Her presence in “The Intoxicated” disrupts the cultural script of the passive, consumerist teenager by reviving a forgotten mode of adolescent agency rooted in critique, clarity, and rupture with the past.

Conclusion
As such, “The Intoxicated” is not simply a story of generational divide, but a cultural parable of postwar America. It is a confrontation between the ideological intoxication of normalcy and the sobering residue of structural crisis. Thus, in Shirley Jackson’s short story, Eileen emerges as a figure of radical interruption, one who breaks through the ideological logic of late capitalism and the spectacle that sustains it. Her presence represents a rupture not only in the narrative’s generational dynamic but in the entire semiotic and temporal order of postmodern culture. Echoing the critical awareness once cultivated by Depression-era student movements like the NSL, Eileen refuses both the commodified identity of the teenager and the modern passivity embodied by the adult protagonist. She speaks not from within the spectacle, but against it.

The confrontation at the heart of “The Intoxicated,” between an intoxicated adult numbed by spectacle and a lucid adolescent unbound by commodified time, offers more than a generational clash. It stages a political and epistemological struggle between two historically situated forms of subjectivity. In Eileen’s voice, we glimpse the submerged residue of a youth politicized by material conditions and historical consciousness, a subjectivity now repressed by the logic of reification that defines late capitalism. What Jackson dramatizes through this encounter is not only a generational rift but an early manifestation of the cultural transformation that would later be theorized as postmodernism. The ideological and affective symptoms that Jameson and Debord describe—dispossession of historical agency, the substitution of image for experience, and the translation of critique into consumption—are already discernible in the postwar landscape Jackson captures.

Although Fredric Jameson and Guy Debord would not articulate their theories of postmodernism and the spectacle until decades after Jackson wrote “The Intoxicated,” their frameworks illuminate tendencies already germinating in the late 1940s. Jackson’s 1949 story occupies a transitional moment, poised between the waning of Depression-era political radicalism and the rise of Cold War consumer capitalism, when the cultural conditions that Jameson later calls “the postmodern” were beginning to take shape. As these theorists would argue, postmodern culture erodes depth, memory, and historical agency, replacing them with surface images, addictive consumption, and narrative foreclosure. Reading Jackson through their lens, then, is not to impose an anachronism but to trace the early contours of that shift. In this light, Eileen’s apocalyptic imagination acquires prophetic force: her vision of the future anticipates the ideological conditions that Jameson and Debord would later diagnose. The teenager, once a figure of political possibility, is already being refashioned as a market identity and Jackson’s story exposes this metamorphosis at its inception. What Jackson offers through Eileen is thus not a retrospective application of postmodern theory but a glimpse of its historical emergence, a moment when adolescence still harbors the potential for dissident historical imagination. That imagination, however, is culturally marginal. The spectacle’s consolidation in postwar America did not merely obscure political alternatives; it actively erased them. The voices of radical youth—once visible in campus protests, anti-fascist organizing, and student-labor alliances—were rewritten as noise, confusion, or deviance. Jackson’s story recovers the tone of that dissent, not to offer utopia, but to mark the absence of it and to remind us that what has been buried still haunts the present.

This study has focused on a close reading of “The Intoxicated” through the lens of postmodern theory and the historical memory of radical youth movements. However, its scope is necessarily limited. Further research could examine how broader systems of Cold War state surveillance, particularly the FBI’s monitoring and repression of student organizations, influenced literary representations of youth across mid-century American fiction. Additionally, while this paper has centered on Eileen as a singular literary figure, future studies might trace the residues of radical subjectivity across a wider range of postwar narratives. Even in texts that appear depoliticized on the surface, fragments of suppressed dissent such as ambivalent tones, disruptive characters, or gaps in ideological coherence, may persist as literary echoes of a buried political imagination. Exploring these silences and disruptions would help further map the cultural erasure, and potential survival, of youth radicalism in the age of the spectacle.

Works Cited

Cohen, Robert. When the Old Left Was Young. Oxford University Press, 1993.

Cosgrove, Ben. “‘The Luckiest Generation’: LIFE with Teenagers in 1950s America.” LIFE, 29 Nov. 2014, www.life.com/history/the-luckiest-generation-life-with-teenagers-in-1950s-america/.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Black & Red, 1977.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1972. Bloomsbury Revelations, 2009.

Digital Public Library of America. “Childhood in Postwar America.” Digital Public Library of America, dp.la/exhibitions/children-progressive-era/childhood-postwar-america/teenage-culture.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2009.

Jackson, Shirley. “The Intoxicated.” The Lottery and Other Stories. 1949. Penguin Classics, 2009.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991.

Marx, Karl. Capital. 1867. Penguin Classics, 1992.Savage, Jon. Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture. Pimlico, 2008.