Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist

Abstract

Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist portrays a world inhabited by characters whose unified, other-proof subjectivity crumbles around them to reveal the basic fibres of the biological, organicist body as this is mutated across bodies and projected across images. Such sameness and connection are primarily played out in the language and the style used. The paper examines linguistic techniques such as the use of logical conjunction (e.g., and) and causal connectives, such as because, which instead of signaling causality, constantly rephrases the same as an expanded other, thus effectively subverting our common sense perceptions. In this context, the absence of representational means of identity resulting in the redefinition of Lauren’s subjectivity on a broader biological plane also reconciles her to the grief felt at her husband’s death.