Fluid Selves, Vanishing Anchors: Liquid Modernity and the Disappearing Self in Ben Lerner's 10:04

This paper explores the formal and thematic strategies through which Ben Lerner’s 10:04 articulates the disintegration of selfhood in an era shaped by liquid modernity and late capitalism. Through recursive narration, speculative autobiography, and disrupted temporality, the novel embodies the instability it critiques, offering a poetics of precarity that mirrors the affective and structural impasses of neoliberal life. Drawing on theories by Zygmunt Bauman, Lauren Berlant, Jean Baudrillard, and Peter Boxall, the analysis situates 10:04 as a paradigmatic text of contemporary autofiction where identity is commodified, the future is financialised, and artistic creation is suspended in a loop of endless potentiality. Rather than offering resolution, Lerner’s novel inhabits the impasse between cultural exhaustion and creative aspiration, presenting the narrative not as redemption but as an archive of endurance amid systemic disintegration.