The Big Short Literary Elements

Non-Fiction

The lead-up to the 2007-2008 housing crisis

Michael Lewis, who has personal experience on Wall Street, narrates the events

Sarcastic, biting, analytical

Michael Burry, Steve Eisman, Charlie Ledley, Jamie Mai, Ben Hockett as protagonists, and everyone on Wall Street who did not believe their predictions as antagonists

Between those few people who predicted the disaster to come in advance, and everyone else who believed that the housing market could never crash

When the housing market finally crashed, and those who had bet against it were given their due but also forced to reckon with the situation

Michael Burry's response to investors, after his fund makes a huge profit off of the financial crisis of 2007-2008, is largely an understatement. For example, he emails Gotham Capital, his founding investor, saying only "You're welcome." Given just how much money he made for these investors and how badly they treated him, his response comes across as an understatement.

Michael Lewis frequently alludes to the financial crisis of the 1980s, which he observed first-hand as a trader, in order to make comparisons to the crisis of 2007-2008 and trace the roots of this second crisis back to the first.

In the second to last chapter, the narrator refers to the incoming financial crisis as something that could no longer be controlled. In preceding chapters, he traces what led up to the crisis and how it could have been avoided. In this last chapter, however, he shifts to illustrate just how inevitable the crash became after Wall Street acted so badly. He compares the market to a bomb that was about to go off, on a set timer. As he says, "it was as if bombs of differing sizes had been placed in virtually every major Western financial institution. The fuses had been lit and could not be extinguished. All that remained was to observe the speed of the spark, and the size of the explosions." This simile helps readers to understand that the catastrophe had become inevitable, and hugely destructive, and all anyone could do at that point was watch it happen. It also helps to explain that the disaster did have a number of levels; not everything happened all at once, but rather at different speeds and scales.

The major paradox of the book is that those with the least experience on Wall Street and the most bizarre, maligned outlook on the world were the only people who were able to recognize and make money off of the impending housing crisis that struck in 2007-2008