One of the major themes shown throughout the novel is the fear of death. Don Delillo uses Jack’s character to emphasize the negative consequences of dreading death throughout a person’s life. Jack wonders and worries about his death daily. There are several aspects about death that make him anxious. First, he’s scared that his death won’t be peaceful. In chapter five, Jack wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks “Shouldn’t death, I thought, be a swan dive, graceful…?” (18). He also is fearful of his wife, Babette, dying before him such as in chapter seven “who will die first?” (30); he doesn’t want to be alone. Jack constantly consumes himself with these melancholy thoughts. He is an example of someone who wastes their life because of the fear of not living. This creates not only a theme in the novel but irony as well. It is even more ironic at the end of the novel when he attempts to kill Willy because he is so against death. This could reveal a sense of selfishness because he is only concerned with his own death, or it could show how crazy he becomes after the knowledge of his wife’s affair. Never the less, Delillo exaggerates Jack’s fear of death to get his point across to the reader that dreading death only wastes time and possibly, a life.
A major tunring point for Jack and the novel is the Airborne Toxic Event. This causes him to face his fear of death, due to his exposure to the radiation. The Toxic Event also causes these wonderful, mythical sunsets that Jack describes with incredibly romantic language. At the very end of the novel, DeLillo describes a scene with all of Jack's family and the town on the overpass to look at one of the beautiful sunsets. If the toxic event represents the fear of death, the sunsets represent a sort of great overcoming of the fear of death. By the end of the novel, Jack has come to terms with his own mortality, and the sunsets serve as a beautiful manifestation of this and a sort of solidarity between all the people in their suburban town who all must face their own mortality eventually.
A major tunring point for Jack and the novel is the Airborne Toxic Event. This causes him to face his fear of death, due to his exposure to the radiation. The Toxic Event also causes these wonderful, mythical sunsets that Jack describes with incredibly romantic language. At the very end of the novel, DeLillo describes a scene with all of Jack's family and the town on the overpass to look at one of the beautiful sunsets. If the toxic event represents the fear of death, the sunsets represent a sort of great overcoming of the fear of death. By the end of the novel, Jack has come to terms with his own mortality, and the sunsets serve as a beautiful manifestation of this and a sort of solidarity between all the people in their suburban town who all must face their own mortality eventually.
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