Inside the Dream of the Warfare State: Mass and Massive Fantasies in Don DeLillo's Underworld

This essay explores the question of "realness" in Don DeLillo's Underworld, realness in unofficial, individual fantasies and in national fantasies that shape the idea of the nation in the latter half of the twentieth century. The essay focuses on reality as an ideological fantasy-construction, a sense of the sublime deriving from all-powerful military technology and economic and racial contradictions in marginal areas of the nation. This study intends a critique of the ideological workings of the warfare state in Underworld through an investigation into the characters' psychological mechanisms as they fluctuate between anxiety about, and fascination with, destructive technology.