The present study aims atclosely investigating Hubert Selby Jr.’s Requiem for a Dream and The Demon, based on Slavoj Žižek’s critique of violence, desire, and fantasy. In a sequence of influential books, Žižek formulates a new framework to look at the role of violence within modern society, approaching it in terms of Objective and Subjective violence, and to shed light on the unbearable enigma of the desire as a state of motivation or drive for seeking pleasure through his theory of fantasy. Žižek explores the critique of ideology and states that the experience of desire is established within sets of social conditions and ideologies, and the desire of the subject is necessarily shaped by ideologies bounded with the social codes, structures, and beliefs. Requiem for a Dream and The Demon, written by the significant twentieth-century writer, Hubert Selby, are complex and monumental works that highly depict the failings of modern society. This research seeks to study his achievements of Requiem for a Dream and The Demon, in the light of the Žižek theory of the shattered fantasy, violence, cruelty and the unfulfillment of desire to analyze how these concepts were represented in the novels.
