The Possibility of Convergence: A Study of Narrative Structure in Don DeLillo's Fiction

This essay seeks to identify and discuss a recurrent narrative pattern in Don DeLillo's middle period novels, namely Libra, Underworld, Cosmopolis, and Falling Man. The pattern can be tentatively described as a multiplotted narrative structure, combining several sequences of events of varying duration and order. I propose the category "converging narratives" to depict it, drawing on the ambivalent meaning of "convergence" itself and referring to both the tendency converge and its fulfilment. I will argue that DeLillo's converging narratives work as sophisticated creative interrogations of the ideas of sequence and causality, which are insufficiently described through existing terminology. I draw on unnatural narratology and poststructuralist theory in order to formally describe and discuss the implications of DeLillo's converging narratives, identifying the ways in which narrative convergence fails to produce a sense of totality in them. My reading of these texts tries to move beyond the critical tendency to inscribe them within binary systems of aesthetic classification around realism, postmodernism, and post-postmodernism, which concentrate on the relation of fiction to the representation of totalities or closed systems. My conclusion points to how DeLillo creatively articulates an irresoluble tension between opposing forces at work within the very concept of "convergence."