Cocaine Nights, by J.G. Ballard, follows Charles Prentice a he travels to Spain to investigate the involvement of his brother in the death of five people in the coastal resort Estrella de Mar. Throughout the course of his investigation, Prentice discovers that below the veneer of upper crust society there is a secret world of drugs, crime, and illicit sex. The tennis coach, Bobby Crawford, may be seen as the novel’s antihero, with Prentice ultimately coming to see Crawford as a type of saint, one that simply happens to live outside of the law. By working to understand the correlation between violence and community within the novel, it is possible to see the necessity of a character like Crawford and his manner of dealing with the situation.

The resort, Estrella de Mar, functions as its own community, one in which the retired rich are able to view as their own playground, always carefree, always complacent, living lives of leisure undeterred by the struggles of the common masses. The sense of community felt by these individuals stems from two distinct beliefs: first that they are above the issues of everyone else, and second, that they are entitled to all that they have. Crawford believes that it is his duty to shake up the resorts, making the problems of one the problems of all, forcing the masses to wake up and pay attention to something other than themselves.

The actions, the crimes that occur are seen not as crimes in and of themselves, but rather as the necessary means to an end, waking up the populace and making them engage in the world around them once more. The violence starts small, graffiti on doors, small scale burglaries, and expands concentrically, escalating to drug trafficking and ultimately murder. The premise behind the violence is that the crime wave continues until simply rage and anger regarding the situation is not enough. The individuals dealing with these situations are forced to rethink themselves on every level, reworking themselves until they no longer take anything they have for granted anymore, causing them to appreciate life again.

The violence present within Cocaine Nights is a necessity for the social commentary created by Ballard. The characters each deal with the violence in the book in their own way, until such a point that they are no longer able to treat the violence as mere violence. These individuals must then work to understand the varying reasons for their ire, their anger, and other feelings associated with and occurring as a result of the violence to which they have now been exposed. Each of these individuals is required to step out of their selfish bubble, working to come back into reality to deal with the matter at hand. Though each character may work through the violence in their own right, all characters are able to come to the same conclusion. It is no longer possible to sit idly by and simply allow the world to continue without them. In order for one to enjoy the world, one must be a full part of it.

Violence is used as a tool in Cocaine Nights; it is seen as a means to an end, and not an end in and of itself. It is not meant as a malicious act, but as a method of working to get the individual to open up, to expand their consciousness and their worldview, allowing them to view the world in the manner that they had long ago forgotten, much in the same way that individuals in today’s society have forgotten how to do. Ballard uses Cocaine Nights, and Crawford specifically, as a means of attempting to do what Crawford did within the novel, use violence to cause the masses to start thinking once more.