Death and Metafiction: On the “Ingenious Architecture” of Point Omega

Abstract

This essay proposes a method for re-reading Don DeLillo’s 2010 novel Point Omega. While criticism of the novel focuses on DeLillo’s recent metafictional gestures toward ineffability and existential despair, this essay reads the novel as a metafictional gesture toward the necessity of fiction in the twenty-first century. It does so by reviewing the tripartite structure of the novel as being the product, in its entirety, of the protagonist Jim Finley. The main narrative of the novel consists of his first-person account of a traumatic experience in the desert of California with Iraq War propagandist Richard Elster. The chapters that bookend the novel tell, in an omniscient third-person mode, of an unnamed man viewing Douglas Gordon’s film 24-Hour Psycho at the Museum of Modern Art. This essay reads these bookending sections as also authored by Finley, rather than by an invisible narrator or an implied author. To do so reads Point Omega as the story first and foremost of a character coming to terms with trauma and tragedy by turning to fiction, rather than by abandoning communication, as does Elster. Such a reading reaffirms DeLillo’s faith in the power of fiction to cope with twenty-first century ills, and with death itself.