Predicament In Rooms

Don De Lillo, the author of fifteen novels to date, has become one of the most renowned postmodern American writers. Constantly preoccupied with history, politics, and the cultural crises of contemporary America, he is honored as a social critic writer. Published in 1988 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Libra has earned great reputations to date. USA Today comments that: “Libra operates at a dizzyingly high level of intensity throughout; it’s that true fictional rarity—a novel of admirable depth and relevance that’s also a terrific page-turner”. However, this novel does not get enough attentions among scholars from home and abroad. Moreover, no one ever tries to analyze it from the spatial approach.Traditionally, time overwhelms space when it comes to the literary creation. However, in the trend of modernism, writers always break the traditional time sequence in their narratives, and their novels is characterized with spatial elements as fragment and juxtaposition. There is a spatial turn in the late 20 th in the theoretical research, and the space is becoming increasingly important. W. J. T. Mitchell mentions that space “has unquestionably been central to modern criticism not only of literature but of the fine arts and of language and culture in general”(539).The importance of space cannot be overestimated in Libra, since the spatial elements are pervasive and half of the novel’s chapters are named by key locales. This thesis attempts to analyze Libra from the spatial perspective. Different spatial theories could emphasize on different aspects of spatial elements. Nevertheless, some common spatial elements exist in various theories. For instance, people could find physical space in both Frank and Lefebvre’s spatial theories, and the physical space much assembles Soja’s first space; little differences exist in Lefebvre’s mental space and Soja’s second space; Zoran’s textual space coincides with Frank’s spatial form. Those are three most commonly seen spatial aspects in various spatial theories. In order to avoid confusion, they are uniformly named as physical space, mental space and textual space in this thesis, which will be used to analyze Libra.This thesis is composed of five parts. The first part is the introduction about Don De Lillo and his Libra, literature review and theoretical framework. The second part is the first chapter of the main body. Using the room as an example, this chapter emphasizes the influence of physical space on Oswald, Everett and Branch, through which their respective predicaments are reflected. The second chapter mainly analyzes different characters’ mental space, namely, the absence of subjectivity, sense of alienation and state of paranoia, which maps the mental states of the whole American public. The third chapter discusses how De Lillo enriches the textual spatial form through the juxtaposition of multiple focalization, fragmented and multiple narrative lines and the sense of incompleteness. Finally, the conclusion part briefly concludes the importance of space in Libra and makes a review of the process of the spatial analysis of this novel. This thesis analyzes different characters’ predicaments in rooms and the influence of space on them, which reflects the American public’s morbid mental states as alienation and paranoid.