The Anxiety Complex In Don DeLillo’s Underworld

Don De Lillo(1936 一)is a distinguished writer in American contemporary literature.He is regarded by Harold Bloom as one of the four major American novelists of his time,the other three being Thomas Pynchon,Philip Roth,and Cormac Mc Carthy.His novels have covered such diverse fields as technological development,terrorism,consumerism and mass culture,penetrating into the anxiety and paranoia brought by the Cold War,the ecological crisis by irrational use of technology and the rampant consumer culture.De Lillo’s Underworld,published in 1977,is widely regarded as his greatest novel with more than eight hundred pages.This novel depicts a society suffused with nuclear panic,consumerism and rampant technological waste during American Cold War era.It also reflects De Lillo’s great concern about modern people in a technological world.This thesis consists of three parts.Introduction gives a brief summary of Don De Lillo and his works,summarizes the former achievement and current situation of research on Underworld,puts forward feasibility of this thesis’ s research angle and expounds significance of this thesis.Besides,based on the theory of anxiety as its theoretical foundation,this paper will have a profound study of the characters’ anxiety through psychoanalysis and existentialism.The main body consists of three chapters.Chapter One and Chapter Two analyze the manifestation and reasons of anxiety,illustrating the fact that the prevalence and desire of consumerism,the magic and dread of technology,the waste and injustice of environment contribute to anxiety,reflected by uncertainty of identity under nuclear panic,abnormal behaviors of racial discrimination in the Cold War and fear of death in the carnival of capital.Chapter Three explores characters’ defensive strategies against anxiety,for De Lillo,art can become the hope of confronting the anxiety,because artists not only recycle and aestheticize the waste,but also make resistance through the means of self-expression to achieve the redemptive power.Finally,“chaos” can turn to “peace”.The last part is conclusion which summarizes the importance and value of this novel.From the perspective of anxiety theory,this thesis exposes all sorts of crises faced by the American.Don De Lillo is a brave artist who criticizes the loss of ethics in America by only writing "Peace" as the last paragraph of Underworld,which mainly embodies the values of ethics and the art can be the way out of anxiety predicament for modern people.