돈 들릴로(Don DeLillo)의『지하세계』(Underworld)에 나타난 개인과 집단의 관계

Abstract

Don DeLillo’s fiction examines many of the fundamental issues pertaining to postmodern culture and theory. He criticizes various symptoms of techoculture and consumer society using postmdoern devices such as television, film, sports games, shopping mall, and toxic wastes. Though his plot is very complicated, grand and scattered as other writers in this age, he uses a traditional realistic narrative emphasizing the role of language. According to him, television and film frame our world, not words on paper. He believes that in the future world, the language could be no more the indispensable vehicle of thought. DeLillo successfully transforms the world of images into words in his novels. According to one of his characters in Underworld, there is the fusion of two streams of history, weapon and waste, which play large parts of the novel. The novel explores how all technology refers to the bomb, especially nuclear one, in the postwar period. Waste in Underworld is, practically, a main character, embracing everything including human wastes and nuclear wastes. They are everywhere in the novel. Nuclear explosion and mushroom cloud are the most spectacular waste that has made modern people obsessed with collective fear. Many characters in the novel suffer from paranoia that are directly connected to the overt concern with the nuclear threat. However, in the novel, waste turned into art. The artists work junk and saved it for art, which, DeLillo believes, has a redemptive power in the world of apocalyptic anxieties. DeLillo has been fascinated by crowds. He thinks that the future belongs to crowds. DeLillo says “there is something menacing and violent about a mass of people which makes us think of the end of individuality.” Mao II opened with a mass wedding of Monies, which inspired him to write it. Underworld begins with the crowds in the polo ground and ends with the crowds gathering to see the miraculous image of Esmeralda. Individuals want to be members of a group to overcome their sense of fear and anxiety, which originate from postmodern culture and, originally from the disconnectedness from their mother. Many individuals in the novel, spiritually or physically isolated, are struggling to be connected to a group of people. However they fail to find sense of connectedness and peace in a group or a family. DeLillo senses the anxiety and uneasiness beneath the group of people. In the medea and consumer society, people live obsessed by images and the news. The homerun ball of Thomson spiritually connect individuals with groups like family or those who share nostalgia for past when there were somethings real. Every thing is connected in the end and there is nothing but wastes, not peace.