Vivisection au ralenti: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega

Abstract

Reading a Don DeLillo is like walking on glass, that is, you need hold your breath so that nothing could deter you from focusing on the mission, if you want to keep safe and mostly sound. The writer’s latest novel, Point Omega (2010), is no exception in that its author engages once more in the exercise of stripping away all surfaces so as to let us see into the terror of what he calls “makeshift reality”—his characters’ and ours. The claims I advance and substantiate in the essay, refer to (1) how a fluid chronology sustained by framing devices adds to the understanding of the construct of a novel/film
in progress; (2) how the shifting narrative perspective ensures a vivisectionist’s look into the body of life/death/world. Don DeLillo’s novel is another terrifying X-ray of war/life/death as agonizing nothingness which literature in its ‘late-phase’ is meant to cure.