Faculty Scholarship

Document Type

Book Chapter/Essay

Publication Title

Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives

ISBN

9781350040861

Publication Date

2018

Abstract

Libra is a metafictional labyrinth. CIA historian Nicholas Branch is not only a character in the novel but also the embedded author of the narrative. James Joyce used this autological approach in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Libra replicates this metafictional structure, borrowing a number of themes and motifs from Stephen Dedalus and the mythical artificer Daedalus along the way. Although Dedalus succeeds in using his art as wings to escape his imprisonment, Branch ultimatley fails. The artifice he creates becomes his metafictional prison.

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