On Fear Of Death In The Society Of The Spectacle In Don DeLillo’s Zero K

Don DeLillo is one of the most significant and distinguished contemporary American writers,DeLillo’s later novels consistently feature the theme of the fear of death,with Zero K keenly capturing people’s fear of death in an era of advanced media technology.While scholars at home and abroad mainly interpret the novel from the posthuman and existentialist perspectives,little attention has been paid to the impact of media on fear of death.Therefore,this thesis will mainly adopt the textual analysis,the society of the spectacle theory,and terror management theory to dig into the fear of death in the novel.This thesis consists of an introduction,the main body,and a conclusion.First,the thesis introduces the biography of Don DeLillo,his literary achievements,the main contents of Zero K,and the current domestic and international studies on Zero K,as well as the research task and research structure of this thesis.The main body has three chapters.First,by examining the representations of the fear of death,the thesis aims to unveil the spectacle’s manipulation of the fear of death.And then the purposes that the society of the spectacle manipulates the fear of death are explored.In the end,the thesis elucidates the significance of Don DeLillo’s writing about the fear of death in the society of the spectacle.The first chapter analyzes the representations of the fear of death: it is mainly divided into fear of physical death and fear of spiritual death.The fear of physical death is shown in the denial of disease and aging,and resistance to disaster.While the fear of spiritual death contains the threatened cultural worldview and threatened self-esteem.This chapter also investigates the society of the spectacle’s manipulation of the fear of death through the mediatization of death and commodification of life,effectively evoking people’s fear of death.The second chapter further scrutinizes the purposes of disseminating fear of death in the society of the spectacle:to create pseudo-needs and impose implicit discipline.On the one hand,the society of the spectacle manipulates fear of death by stimulating the desire for eternal life and spectacular fame,which helps buffer the fear of physical death and fear of spiritual death,to promote cryopreservation and gain profit.On the other hand,the spectacle imposes implicit discipline by instilling the fear of death,which is achieved through the use of various disaster footage that fuels people’s dissatisfaction with reality and leads people to indulge in spectacles,thereby colonizing their daily lives.The third chapter analyzes the significance of DeLillo’s depiction of fear of death in the society of the spectacle,which aims to unveil the spectacle’s hegemony.Spectacle’s hegemony utilizes emerging media technologies to invade individuals’ lives,ultimately forcing them to become passive spectators and mere tools for capital accumulation.Therefore,the depiction of the fear of death exposes the hypocrisy and critiques the alienation and technology’s subservience to the spectacle.In the concluding part,the thesis sums up the previous discussion and the central arguments of the thesis and argues that the fear of death portrayed in Zero K reflects the prevalent reification and spectacle’s hegemony in the society of the spectacle.Moreover,DeLillo’s critique of the society of the spectacle in employing media to implicitly discipline people’s behavior and incite pseudo-needs underscores the resulting alienation and collapse of technological ethics.