November 22, 2003

delillo on oswald

Frontline posts Q&A with Don DeLillo, Edward Epstein and Gerald Posner on “Oswald: Myth, Mystery and Meaning.” Here’s DeLillo on the absurdity of a single man changing the course of history.

The 20th century was built largely out of absurd moments and events. In time we had to invent an adjective, European and literary, that might encapsulate the feeling of impending menace and distorted reality and the sense of a vast alienating force that presses the edges of individual choice. These things are Kafkaesque. In America it is the individual himself, floating on random streams of disaffection, who tends to set the terms of the absurd.