Personaggi “planetari”: il caso di Don DeLillo

Abstract

In the last twenty years, the issue of literary characters’ identity has been a crucial one. Characters have in fact tended to increasingly display unstable, split and multiple identities as a consequence of the contact with settings or other characters radically different from those of the past. The literary production of the American novelist Don DeLillo is very significant in this sense: in his novels the identity issue is always foregrounded, his characters being often the victims of identifications with other characters, or suffering the contact with ‘global’ settings. Two novels have been selected in order to study the impact of such dimensions on their subjectivity: Libra, which was published in 1988 and soon became a classic, and Cosmopolis (2003), dominated by a continuous infiltration of the media in the lives of its protagonists.