Dunst A (2017)
Publication Type: Journal article, Review article
Publication year: 2017
Book Volume: 62
Pages Range: 35-49
Journal Issue: 1
Point Omega, Don DeLillo's latest novel, is haunted by the breakdown of social relations.1 Framed by the evocation of Douglas Gordon's video 24 Hour Psycho, the book follows Richard Elster, a retired intellectual hired to provide justification for the Iraq War (28). DeLillo's protagonist seeks to escape from history and violence, guilt and consciousness. His avowed goal of non-relation, the abandonment of interaction for the desert landscape of the American southwest, has already been achieved by his daughter Jessie, and so it is she who is described as the bleak future of humanity: One day soon all our talk, his and mine, will be like hers, just talk, self-contained, unreferring. We'll be here the way flies and mice are here, localized, seeing and knowing nothing but whatever our scanted nature allows. A dim idyll in the summer flatlands.
APA:
Dunst, A. (2017). Ordinary madness: Don DeLillo's subject from underworld to point omega. Amerikastudien, 62(1), 35-49.
MLA:
Dunst, Alexander. "Ordinary madness: Don DeLillo's subject from underworld to point omega." Amerikastudien 62.1 (2017): 35-49.
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