Don DeLillo

by definition stories of failure. Humans are flawed, and our shared fukú is our acute awareness of our seemingly innumerable flaws and our inability to conquer them despite that awareness, and the characters we have read about are no different. In Don Delillo’s White Noise, Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed the characters are all haunted by feelings of discontent that leave them restless. White Noise’s Jack Gladney is an odd and…

Identity seems to be something important to human beings throughout life and something that is always brought to our attention with the question “what makes you, you?”. Throughout life, we experience personal events that shape us to be who we are. Although often times, we can put on a mask and act as someone we really aren't, which is what happens to Jack Gladney in White Noise. Jack Gladney is an intelligent college professor who studies the academic field of Hitler Studies and founded it in…

Marital Strife in Eat a Bowl of Tea and Falling Man Though separated by different time periods, areas of New York, and even cultures, the novels Eat a Bowl of Tea by Louis Chu and Falling Man by Don DeLillo are similar in their depiction of the marital crisis. In the novel Eat a Bowl of Tea, the main character Ben Loy lives in Chinatown in the 1940s with his wife, who is having an affair with his cousin. In the novel Falling Man, the main character Keith lives in lower Manhattan in 2001 (post-…

best sense, novel like. It narrates a story in a skillful manner, with much attention to character. DeLillo makes us familiar with some peculiar habits of the characters. Like Everett cannot make himself go to bed at night without checking that the oven is off, and then sometimes double-checking, and reminding himself as he climbs the stairs that he has in fact completed his check. No doubt DeLillo has chosen such a sensitive theme, that of the assassination of Kennedy, yet he hardly draws out…

On an April day in 2000, throughout the ‘booming’ times of a market optimistic community when the culture was boiling over with money and the corporations had seemed more vital as an asset and more influential than the governments. Eric Michael Packer, a billionaire manager at the age of 28, had emerged from his luxurious penthouse an settled into his personally advanced customized white stretch limousine. That day, he was a man with two distinctively different missions: to pursue a bet against…

the dress that was posted by Caitlin McNeil was blue and black or gold and white. Kakutani seem as though she’s trying to ramble until she hits a word count or finds the thesis of the article in question. An example of this would be her quotes of Don Delillo and Taylor Branch in which they talk about how much…

California California has lots of beaches and fun boardwalks to walk down. It is a great place to vacation or live. It is a tourist destination making it very packed full of people in most cities. According to Don DeLillo “California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of lifestyle. This alone warrants their doom.” This quote pretty much sums up California. Some even consider California a lifestyle, because of the adventure you’ll find, and the dreams you deem impossible…

trapped in these fun houses by the monotony of life, and it takes a traumatic event to jolt them awake and realize that the truth lies beyond the glass. These moments manifest themselves in many different forms, but in Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt” and Don Delillo’s White Noise, these moments come about through the promise or possibility of death. As the parents in Bradbury’s novel are killed by their children and Delillo’s Jack Gladney is shot…

Nearly a decade and a half after the tragic and deadly attack of Islamic extremists of Al-Qaeda under leader Osama bin Laden known as 9/11, the effects are still felt and shown not only economically or politically, but on a deeper and more personal social level as well. The threats from ISIS have America on the brink of war yet again as the war on terror with the United States will never come to an end. Now called Patriot Day, September 11th was detrimental to the United States in many aspects…

Today, many people define society based on the modernity and postmodernity movements. The definition of the modernity movement lies in the characteristics of modern societies that have capitalistic economies and democratic political structures that are highly industrialized. Postmodernity is almost the same as modernity, but the communication of technology and process of information included in the postmodernity movement differentiates it from modernity. Loosely stated, postmodernity is the…