POSTMODERN DISINTEGRATION: TRAUMA AND THE FRAGMENTED PSYCHE IN DON DELILLO’S FICTION

Abstract

Don DeLillo’s fiction persistently probes the fragile interior of the postmodern self, presenting subjectivity as fractured, unsettled, and deeply marked by trauma. Focusing on The Body Artist and Falling Man, this paper explores how traumatic experience erodes the coherence of identity through distorted perceptions of time, moments of derealization, and forms of dissociative selfhood. Drawing on postmodern theory, trauma studies, and narratological analysis, the study suggests that trauma in DeLillo’s work functions not simply as an individual psychological wound but as an enduring condition of postmodern life itself. Through bodily enactment, fractured temporal structures, and the persistence of intrusive memory, DeLillo’s characters reveal a decentered subject struggling to sustain meaning and continuity within the pressures of late capitalism and the aftermath of 9/11.