The Death of the Self? Narrative Form, Intertextuality, and Autonomy in Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End

This essay offers a critical examination of Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End. It draws attention to Ferris’s extensive use of intertextual references to Don DeLillo, Joseph Heller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson and analyzes those references in relation to the worlds of finance, commerce, and advertising. The essay also discusses the significance of the novel’s temporal structure and its unusual narrative point of view, and it demonstrates how formal experimentation echoes and amplifies the book’s thematic concerns.