Graduate Program

English

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

2006

Thesis Director

Tim Engles

Thesis Committee Member

Chris Hanlon

Thesis Committee Member

Michael Loudon

Abstract

The novels of Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy are heavily pervaded by themes of mortality and its denial. DeLillo's White Noise (1985), with its emblematic centerpiece of an "Airborne Toxic Event," was succeeded by the slim depiction of mourning deferred, The Body Artist (2001). Likewise, Cormac McCarthy's epic Appalachian novel, Suttree (1979), is ridden with images of death and strangled mourning, a work followed by Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West (1985), a historiographic depiction of unrelenting, culturally repressed bloodshed. This thesis maintains that DeLillo and McCarthy warn us in these novels about the American way of death, and about how death American-style is continually denied, at both the cultural and individual levels. They also examine how little recourse most Americans have to useful and effective rituals of bereavement. In effect, DeLillo and McCarthy are saying that because the repression and denial of death are so pervasive, there is no culturally sanctioned American Book of the Dead.

This struggle-with the knowledge of our own impending mortality and with that of others-has been characterized by Carl Elliott as "mortality-dysphoria." The philosophical and psychological insights offered in Ernest Becker's 1973 inquiry, The Denial of Death, help to interrogate the deathly obsessions of DeLillo and McCarthy's texts. DeLillo has acknowledged that Becker's Denial of Death was instrumental in the construction of White Noise; less explicitly, but just as pervasively, Becker's theory about denied mortality being the "mainspring" for human activity is echoed in the other three novels as well. A discernible line of continental thought on the topic preceded Becker's treatise, beginning with Søren Kierkegaard and extending to Jean Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger, and emphasizing an existential approach to the problem of our vexed wish for immortality. DeLillo and McCarthy's works reflect, depict, and refine this suggested existential trajectory. The thinking of Basque philosopher Miguel de Unamuno has particular relevance here as well, as he argues for the cultivation of "a tragic sense of life." The sense of tragedy was usefully reprised in the mid-twentieth century by the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, who identified the position of "tragic man." In sum, these thinkers all posit a notion of authenticity that includes a heightened awareness of death as the hallmark of a fully lived life. This thesis argues that DeLillo and McCarthy's meditations on death in these novels place them in this line of enquiry.

Since these are ostensibly realist novels, DeLillo and McCarthy offer varying levels of character interiority, a device they use to examine the more intricate workings of mortality cognizance. Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection sheds light here, as do Freud's theories of the uncanny and of Thanatos, or a death-drive (in lieu of Eros, which is pervasively absent in these four novels, unless it is an Eros of violence). While we tend to be mortally "dysphoric" as subjects of American culture, we also experience at times "mortality-salience," when our repressed fear of death becomes more conscious. This thesis shows how recent social science studies in this area effectively update Becker's work, specifically research which highlights present-day "terror management" as another way that Americans (mis)handle their species-specific dread of death. In this regard, these novels reflect many themes of the post-Vietnam era in which they were written, including the refracted gleam of American imperialism. This thesis shows how they tie empire and death-denial together, the latter energizing and explaining the former, so that the four novels ultimately function together as "American books of the dead."

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