INVESTIGATING DON DELILLO’S ETHICAL ONTOLOGY THROUGH THE CITY-HERO INTERACTION IN COSMOPOLIS
INVESTIGATING DON DELILLO’S ETHICAL ONTOLOGY THROUGH THE CITY-HERO INTERACTION IN COSMOPOLIS

Summary/Abstract: In my paper I intend to investigate Don DeLillo’s aesthetic approach tocharacter development in Cosmopolis. I will discuss the character’s epistemologicalquest through the city of New York as a neorealistic cinematic odyssey, during whichEric Packer turns from the king of the stock market to the scapegoat of capitalism. Iwill focus mainly on the mode of reality reflection in DeLillo’s fiction, stressing thedisplacement from the phenomenological rendering of reality towards the ethicalontology of perception. This vision, which the author describes in his latter-dayessay “In the Ruins of the Future” (2001), enables readers to activate theirperceptions and stage the action for themselves, by relegating subjectivity andjudgment to the background. The purpose of the present paper is to dwell on themeans of hero-displacement in Cosmopolis, resorting, among other critical tools tomythic-archetypal criticism such as that elaborated by Joseph Campbell in TheHero with a Thousand Faces. Eventually, it seems, DeLillo’s fiction manages tointegrate its hero into the hyper-reality of the cityscape, albeit through theachievement of an imperfect, nearly posthumous feat of illumination. Additionally, Iintend to investigate the connection between Packer’s downfall and the 9/11 eventsso as to prove that Cosmopolis may be regarded as the writer’s response, mirroredon an individual level, to the traumatic event that shook the American nation.

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