Chapter 23 - Death

Summary

Most critics who analyze so-called “late” works—those written by elderly authors – seek to classify those works in terms of stylistic traits. Yet these critics’ definitions frequently contradict each other, suggesting that, as Michael and Linda Hutcheon write, “there are as many late styles as there are late artists.” In light of the fact that many of Don DeLillo’s recent works concentrate on loss and the work of mourning, this chapter proposes that his post-millennial novels display a form of lateness manifest   less in style than in theme and character. Specifically, his late-career works present an array of near-death, suspended life, or afterlife experiences: a gallery of ghosts, zombies and vampires through which, as Edward Said remarks about late musical works, “death appears in a refracted mode, as irony” (24). In other words, the late DeLillo, as he displays in his novels The Body Artist, Falling Man, Point Omega, and Zero K, and his story “The Starveling,” is concerned less with death than with undeath.