“Welcome to the Desert of the Real” : The Politics of Terror in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega

Abstract

This essay proposes a discussion on Don DeLillo’s short novel Point Omega (2010) with a particular focus on its desert setting as a narrative that projects a discourse of the War on Terror. Theoretically, the essay uses Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian notion of “the Real,” as opposed to reality, as an idea that articulates the Western desire for an encounter with the Other. The paper invites postcolonial criticism to maintain that DeLillo’s description of desert terror in Point Omega opens a space for otherness discourse. My argument is twofold. First, I sustain DeLillo’s representation of two sorts of terror: domestic terror, located in New York and which manifests in films and movies, and “unusual terror” located in desert culture. Second, I maintain that DeLillo’s desert is built on the ontological view of terror characterized by the excesses of the Lacanian Real and that leads to an imperialist discourse in the novel.