Closing frames

The concluding chapter reiterates the aim of the study: to ‘break the frame’ which casts DeLillo as a ‘novelist of ideas’ by focusing on the primacy of visual experience in his oeuvre. DeLillo’s work is shot through with some fundamental questions: what do we see and fail to see? How do we see? How might things be seen differently? And how does the way we see the world shape our identity, relationships, ethics, politics and spirituality? The fiction urgently encourages these questions and does not provide easy answers. Solutions, if they can be found, are located in the liminal space between inside and outside, mind and body, word and image the spiritual epiphany and concrete socioeconomic forces. The chapter concludes with a triptych of sunsets: images of the dying light in Ratner’s Star, White Noise and Zero K as exemplary of the core issues addressed in the study and evidence of DeLillo’s connection to the tradition of American Romanticism.