The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

238 Pages·2007·1.3 MB·English

by  Stephanie S. Halldorson

The Hero in Contemporary
American Fiction
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American Literature Readings
in the 21st Century
Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin
American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by
contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of
the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States.
Published by Palgrave Macmillan:
Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the
Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote
By Thomas Fahy
Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics
By Steven Salaita
Women & Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to
Morrison
By Kelly Lynch Reames
American Political Poetry in the 21st Century
By Michael Dowdy
Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain,
and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity
By Sam Halliday
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of
Literary Greatness
By Michael Nowlin
Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories
By Melissa Bostrom
Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry
By Nicky Marsh
James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence
By Piotr K. Gwiazda
Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism
Edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez
The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of
Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo
By Stephanie S. Halldorson
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The Hero in Contemporary
American Fiction
The Works of Saul Bellow
and Don DeLillo
Stephanie S. Halldorson
THE HERO IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION
Copyright © Stephanie S. Halldorson, 2007.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2007 by
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ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–8388–6
ISBN-10: 1–4039–8388–7
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First edition: December 2007
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To my grandmother, Rosalie
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Chapter 1 1
Defining the Hero: Form 1
Where Have All the Heroes Gone? 1
Defining the Hero 5
Welcome the Assumed Hero 8
Defining the American Hero: Story 11
3D Reality and the End Narrative 11
A Brief Overview of Saul Bellow’s Heroes 16
A Brief Overview of Don DeLillo’s Heroes 22
Chapter 2 31
Henderson the Rain King: The Hero Surrendered 31
The Novel and its Hero 31
The Hero in the Novel 42
Chapter 3 71
Mr. Sammler’s Planet: The Hero Accused 71
The Novel and its Hero 71
The Hero in the Novel 85
Chapter 4 109
White Noise: The Hero Defended 109
The Novel and its Hero 109
The Hero in the Novel 121
Chapter 5 145
Mao II: The Hero Returned 145
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viii CONTENTS
The Novel and its Hero 145
The Hero in the Novel 158
Conclusion 179
Notes 185
Bibliography 201
Index 219
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Preface
When I first began my investigations into the hero, it seemed I could
not get out from under Thomas Pynchon’s definition. Everywhere I
looked, I saw as Profane did in Pynchon’s V.:
Nothing heroic about a schlemihl . . . What was a hero? Randolph Scott,
who could handle a six-gun, horse’s reins, lariat. Master of the inani-
mate. But a schlemihl, that was hardly a man: somebody who lies back
and takes it from objects, like any passive woman. (10.3, 288)
And there they were, the heroes: Ulysses, Robin Hood, and the latest
Hollywood leading man. These men were reaching with both hands
to get at the objects of the world and control them: they were heroic.
Needless to say, I couldn’t believe this was a definition good enough
to truly encompass the meaning of “hero.” Was there not to be some
journey? Was there not to be some sort of message? Were all women,
academics, theologians, philosophers, and ascetics removed from the
possibility of being heroic? Could it really be that a hero was simply
the man who held all the marbles at the end of the school day?
Pynchon’s definition is not wrong—we all surely recognize this
heroic type—but it is a type that sits somewhat uncomfortably in our
pluralistic, postmodern world. This hero with his lariat is the hero of a
nostalgic black and white world where there were clear boundaries of
being in a new America. One still likes to think it possible, as Norman
Mailer did when writing about Kennedy’s presidential bid in 1960:
And this myth, that each of us was born to be free, to wander, to have
adventure and to grow on the waves of the violent, the perfumed, and
the unexpected, had a force which could not be tamed no matter how
the nation’s regulators . . . would brick-in the modern life with hygiene
upon sanity, and middle-brow homily over platitude; the myth would
not die. (352–3)
Mailer is correct when he draws attention to the persistent myth of
America as the land that came with a guarantee that each and every
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