It's almost as if Gregor Samsa and Land Surveyor K had stepped out of Kafka's books to inhabit J.G. Ballard's perverse landscapes. Like Kafka, Mr. Ballard deals with the loss of spirit of a mummified world that has its own macabre energy. The gentle ones disappear, they turn into bugs, or are trampled into nothingness. They long for the sleep of the dead. But all this wakefulness becomes a curse.
Continual consciousness is more than the brain can stand.
The three volunteers shrink into themselves, behaving like stiff, wax-work dummies in their own dark sleep. It is this condition of narcolepsy that creeps into Mr. Ballard's stories. His heroes are burdened with a morbid sensitivity to the world around them. They pull the world in upon themselves, wear it as a gruesome tent, so they can exist in some dark knot of the brain. It might be a drowned giant washed onto a beach, or a pilot vagabonding on the ruined atoll of Eniwetok, where the United States tested its hydrogen bomb.