In the prophetic novel Mao II (1991), protagonist (and novelist) Bill Gray notes: ‘Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see.

Beckett’s singularity is also noted in DeLillo’s fictional writing. He is the last writer whose work extends into the world so that (as with Kafka before him) we can see or hear something and identify it as an expression of Beckett beyond the book or stage’ ( 2004: n.p.). Out of the words come the people instead of the other way around. In a 2004 interview DeLillo effusively comments: ‘Beckett is a master of language. The influence of the latter writer on the former is undeniable and often acknowledged by DeLillo himself. These late works, in their ruined state of literary exhaustion, aim to – following Beckett – allow the ‘ void protrude like a hernia’.īorn in 1936, Don DeLillo is one of the oldest contemporary American writers, and his early career (his first novel, Americana, was published in 1971) spans alongside Samuel Beckett’s own writings, notably the famously sparse later works of the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on Beckett’s NoHow On trilogy as a comparative case study, I claim that rethinking Beckett’s writing in terms of late modernism helps to explore his ongoing influence on DeLillo and the particular inhuman forms that populate DeLillo late career depiction of a highly mediatized, globalized and terrorized contemporary.

This vision of Beckett as an heroic author opposed to the mass mind is displaced in DeLillo’s minimalist later writings as they turn away from deploying and exploring highly textualized forms of postmodern subjectivity towards an engagement with material and bodily finitude. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings’. In the prophetic novel Mao II (1991), protagonist Bill Gray notes: ‘Beckett is the last writer to shape the way wethink and see. Much like his Irish predecessor, DeLillo is also a writer caught between modernism and postmodernism (intellectually and stylistically, if not historically). Although Beckett is often self-remarked as a direct influence by DeLillo, the late works – I analyse The Body Artist (2001), Cosmopolis (2003), Falling Man(2007), and the most recent, The Silence (2020) – go further than DeLillo’s earlier writings in pursuing something approximate to what Beckett terms a ‘literature of the unword’. This article explores the influence of Samuel Beckett on Don DeLillo’s postmillennial, twenty-first century fiction.

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