International Journal of English Literature and Culture

Vol. 15(1), pp. 42-50, August 2026

 ISSN: 2360-7831

https://doi.org/10.14662/ijelc2026100

 

Review

 

Abstract

 

In contemporary capitalist societies, money holds a place at the very center of things, giving shape not only to economic exchanges but also to social identities, political institutions, and moral values. This study looks closely at how money and the politics of greed are portrayed in Martin Amis's Money: A Suicide Note (1984). The argument advanced here is that the novel treats greed not as a mere personal failing but rather as something produced structurally by late capitalism and its consumer culture. Through John Self as a character, Amis builds a biting satire of a world in which wealth, consumption, and financial achievement have come to serve as the chief yardsticks of who someone is and what they are worth socially. Grounded in Marxist literary criticism and drawing additionally on the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Baudrillard, the study relies on qualitative textual analysis. It traces the several ways money operates: as economic power, as a marker of social distinction, and as a lever of political influence; at the same time, it considers how consumerism, commodification, and advertising work together to entrench unequal relations of power and to erode both ethical values and genuine human connection. What emerges from this analysis is that Money mounts a searching critique of capitalist ideology, laying bare the mechanisms by which greed, material excess, and consumer desire come to seem normal, even inevitable. In the end, the novel lays open the destructive costs of a society run by economic self-interest, feeding into wider contemporary debates on literature, politics, consumer culture, and neoliberal capitalism.

 

Keywords: Martin Amis; Money: A Suicide Note; capitalism; greed; consumerism; political economy; satire.  

 

Cite This Article As: IBOURAHIMA BORO, AR (2026). MONEY AND THE POLITICS OF GREED IN MONEY: A SUICIDE NOTE (1984) BY MARTIN AMIS. Inter. J. Eng. Lit. Cult. 15(1): 42-50