”Catastrophe is our Bedtime Story”: The Media-Fuelled Obsession with Death in Don Delillo’s Zero K

Abstract

Death and the mass-media represent two recurring and connected presences throughout Don DeLillo’s fiction. While his canonical novel White Noise is themed around the paradoxical link between the pathological fear of dying and consumerism, his latest novel Zero K is about the deferral of death through cryonics. Using the analytical tools of critical theory, the current paper aims to analyse how the portrayal of death appears in the media saturated and consumer-driven environment in which DeLillo’s characters evolve, and how technology contributes both to fuelling the obsession with dying and to feeding the illusion of immortality.

Keywords

• consumerism
• death
• don delillo
• media saturation