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The ideas of negative theology and apophasis in the Menippean Satire reading reminded me of the way morals and sexualities of the characters in Crash are portrayed by Ballard. So far in the novel, there have not been any outright declarations of what is considered right and wrong in the characters' minds or in the world in which they live. However, we can get a pretty clear but hard to articulate idea of the characters' moralities based on their actions and reactions to different events in the novel. For example, when James gets in his first car crash, he is never guilty, shocked, or repulsed by the fact that he had killed a man and was covered in his blood. He and his wife openly cheat on each other, and in the case of his affair with Helen Remington, even encourage the affairs. He and the other characters think of the world in such detached and "abstracted" ways that almost nothing is off limits to them. For example, on page 102 James talks about the possibility of a sexual act happening between Vaughan and himself in an unemotional and unaroused tone: "However carnal an act of sodomy with Vaughan would have seemed, the erotic dimension was absent. Yet this absence made a sexual act with Vaughan entirely possible. The placing of my penis in his rectum as we lay together in the rear seat of his car would be an event as stylized and abstracted as those recorded in Vaughan's photographs." The characters of the novel are not connected on any emotional level, none of them truly care for each other. Even James is pleasantly surprised when his wife Catherine acts slightly worried for him after his crash. They see everything in such analytical and abstract terms that while gaining freedom, they lose connection with others, a critical aspect of being human. Anyway, back to the main point, although we are never told straight out what these characters' belief systems are, we are able to find out through their actions, which makes the novel much more engaging for the reader. Why keep reading if we already know why these people do what they do? I also thought that the part about that "withdrawal of the author as an identifiable presence" was definitely applicable to Crash. The fact that Ballard named the main character after himself makes the intent and mood of the novel that much more real and visceral because it feels like the events in Crash really happened and the novel is really a memoir that was written by James Ballard, the main character. This feeling also comes from the indicate details and explanations that Ballard weaves in and disperses throughout James Ballard's narrative. It is almost as though he is remembering tiny things that he hadn't before just because he is going back in his memory to recall the events of the novel.