1999

1999 appears as the date beneath Hubert Selby Jr.’s Los Angeles signature, closing a reflection that frames the book as the story of four people who mistake the illusion of the American Dream for the visions they carry within them. It anchors that authorial statement in time without establishing the year in which the characters’ experiences occur.

Date and Placement

The year follows the author’s name and Los Angeles, directly after his account of the four individuals’ pursuit of the American Dream and the losses that follow. Its placement associates 1999 with this framing passage: the date belongs to the authorial voice setting out how to understand the book, not to a dated episode in the characters’ lives.

The passage’s conclusion resists the comfort of a completed farewell. Selby doubts that there will ever be a requiem for the Dream, since it may destroy people before they can mourn it, then leaves open the possibility that time will prove him wrong. The 1999 signature fixes that unresolved judgment to a moment; it does not resolve the uncertainty.

What the Date Frames

The reflection distinguishes inward vision from the American Dream as an illusion. In Selby’s account, the four people fail to recognize the difference, and their pursuit of the illusion prevents them from experiencing what was true in their visions. The result, as he puts it, is the loss of everything of value. The date therefore accompanies a concise interpretive frame for the book: it records when this account of the characters’ losses was signed, rather than supplying a calendar setting for those losses.

Relation to the Story’s Time

The narrative scenes represented in the evidence include Harry Goldfarb and Tyrone C. Love riding a bus in the Bronx, their hostile encounter at a gas station in the South, Harry’s arrest and beating, and Tyrone’s abuse in a labor camp. These episodes give concrete places and circumstances, but the cited scenes do not assign them the year 1999. The distinction matters: the date provides a point of reference for the author’s framing statement, while the characters’ chronology remains separate and unspecified here.