Watchtower

In his best seller novel Underworld, Don Delillo comprehensively analyzes the American culture since the Second World War. The novel consists of random narratives that ultimately converge, showing both ugly and beautiful with full realism. This analytical narrative shows the characteristics and the origins of the American culture, by the prominent events in the recent American history and by the effects of those events on the lives of the ordinary citizens. The ideas behind the culture are given in the thoughts of the characters, tracing the philosophical sources of the American culture. The reader can see that the American culture is shaped by many European thinkers, as well as the American ones. Terminologies that Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche have created are always in the language across the Atlantic from Europe. Especially Nietzsche’s way of thinking is embedded in American thought, thus in the thought of the characters of Underworld. Nietzsche discloses the realities hidden under the cultural illusions in his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and also offers a mindset to deal with the heavy reality, a mindset that can be called the “religion” of Zarathustra. As the illusions in the American culture are uncovered by Delillo, it becomes clear that Zarathustra’s religion has settled in the minds of the American society. (more…)