DELILLO’S HALL OF MIRRORS: CREATION, NARRATIVE TRUTH AND THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE SELF

Abstract

This article examines Don DeLillo’s sustained engagement with embedded authorship and mirror-based narrative structures as metafictional mechanisms through which the very notions of narrative truth and coherent subjectivity are placed under pressure. Drawing on Graley Herren’s account of DeLillo’s self-reflexive aesthetic, alongside postmodern and psychoanalytic theoretical frameworks, the study argues that DeLillo constructs a literary “hall of mirrors” in which artistic creation functions ambivalently—as both an interpretive strategy and a form of epistemological confinement. Through the presence of authorial surrogates in Libra, Underworld, and Americana, DeLillo demonstrates how fiction intervenes in historical and psychological absences, offering provisional patterns of meaning that simultaneously erode claims to authenticity. In parallel, recurring mirror imagery and symmetrical narrative designs, often approaching mise en abyme, dramatize a subjectivity increasingly severed from stable referents. Rather than endorsing metafiction as a mode of playful liberation, DeLillo presents self-reflexivity as symptomatic of the closed, self-referential logic of late-capitalist culture. The article concludes that DeLillo’s fiction articulates a critical vision of modern identity as constructed, unstable, and perpetually deferred within a world that has collapsed into its own reflection.