| One way to look at "the hero" is as one who sets out to shed circles of community identity hoping to arrive at a base layer of being or "truth." What the hero finds, however, is the unknowable and the unnarratable. The hero finds, not a void, but the chaos and white noise of everything at once where there is all possibility but no intrinsic pattern or boundaries. The hero's role is to choose an arbitrary pattern from infinite patterns and create a fiction as a way of building a barrier against this chaos for the non-heroes in the community to which he or she will return.;In the post-war period of American literature, changes in the conception of "reality" have caused a crisis in the ability of the hero to return with this narrative of identity. For many authors, there is no believable narrative, and no believable pattern to give to their readers. The lack of new heroic narratives then forces the non-heroic audience to rely upon images of older narratives in order to continue to have some semblance of community identities. They are forced to wear the inauthentic costumes of identity, but no longer find any depth of narrative to pattern and to give boundaries to "reality." If the image is exposed as mere surface, the non-hero is thrown into crisis.;Through the work of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo this thesis looks at how these forced narrations of "authenticity" for non-heroes have actually become marketed, inauthentic images. A detailed analysis of Bellow's Henderson the Rain King and Mr. Sammler's Planet as well as DeLillo's White Noise and Mao II shows how these two authors strive to understand the development of the inauthentic in America and the role of the artist in its perpetuation. Bellow and DeLillo come to see creation of the heroic narrative not only as possible but as a responsibility of the artist. This responsibility extends beyond merely the destruction of previous identities; it entails the creation of a narrative of return---or at least the possibility of return---of the hero. |
