Emotions in crisis: affective narratology in Don DeLillo’s Fiction

Abstract

This thesis examines the narrative and emotional structures of Don DeLillo’s fiction through the combined frameworks of affective narratology and contemporary affect theory. Drawing on Patrick Colm Hogan’s account of universal narrative prototypes and Peter Goldie’s model of narrative thinking and bringing these into sustained dialogue with affect theory and cultural criticism (Ahmed, Berlant, Ngai, Caruth, Nussbaum, and Williams), it argues that DeLillo’s novels stage complex emotional experiences that both rely on and resist narrativization. Focusing on Americana, White Noise, Underworld, The Body Artist, and Falling Man, the study demonstrates how DeLillo formalises emotions such as grief, trauma, regret, and self-forgiveness as pressures on narrative life in contemporary America. The thesis shows how DeLillo reworks Hogan’s romantic, heroic, sacrificial, and minor prototypes, revealing how familiar emotional scripts are held open under late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century conditions. At the same time, Goldie’s account of narrative thinking illuminates how DeLillo’s characters become ‘stuck’ in ongoing emotional processes that elude closure and strain the coherence of traditional narrative forms. Across these novels, grief and trauma are negotiated through rituals, frames, and repetitions that momentarily stabilise overwhelming affect without resolving it, while the portrayal of regret and self-forgiveness reveals how emotional responses are displaced into revenge, investigation, and ritual when personal responsibility intersects with historical forces or collective catastrophe. Overall, DeLillo’s fiction emerges as a sustained meditation on the emotional life of narrative in an age of crisis. His novels neither illustrate affective theories nor confirm narratological models; rather, they test, complicate, and sometimes overturn them. By reading DeLillo through an affective-narratological lens, the thesis argues that his work illuminates the tension between universal narrative structures and the lived, unruly, often incoherent nature of emotion, revealing narrative not as a solution to emotional upheaval but as a fragile, provisional practice for negotiating contemporary American life.

Date of Award	Jun 2026
Original language	English
Sponsors	Department for the Economy
Supervisor	Stephen Butler (Supervisor) & Willa Murphy (Supervisor)