"Longing on a large scale"

models of communitarian reconstitution in Don Delillo's fiction

Paula Martín Salván

pp. 218-237

in: Paula Martín Salván, Gerardo Rodríguez Salas, Julian Jiménez Heffernan (eds), Community in twentieth-century fiction, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

The word "community" rarely occurs in Don DeLillo's fiction. Quite often, his characters have been described as "monads' (Cowart, Physics 119; Engles & Duvall 129), self-enclosed and isolated from each other, incapable of establishing the kind of interpersonal bond eventually leading to the founding of a community. Some have seen in this the true ethos of DeLillo's work, which could be described as the attempt "to trace the dissolution of the postwar American community into isolated monads of fear and estrangement" (Osteen, "DeLillo" 502). In this sense, DeLillo's fiction bears witness to the way in which contemporary thought about community is actually, according to Esposito and Nancy, the 'symptomatic expression" of "the unthink-ability of community" (Esposito 1), "the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community" (Nancy 1).