Don DeLillo’s Myth of the Underworld

This study strives to examine Don DeLillo’s reinvention of the underworld myth in his magnum opus Underworld, demonstrating how the novel transposes classical katabasis (descent into the underworld) and nekyia (invocation of the dead) into a modern socio-political and psychological framework. Through a fragmented narrative structure, DeLillo constructs the underworld as a liminal space where repressed histories, ideological forces, and systemic anxieties converge. Interweaving intertextual references – from Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and The Hollow Men – the novel interrogates the subterranean forces that shape contemporary existence. Central to this exploration is DeLillo’s treatment of waste, both material and symbolic, as a signifier of cultural entropy and historical erasure. This study argues that Underworld redefines the mythic underworld not merely as a metaphor but as an epistemological site where dominant power structures are exposed and subverted through an intricate dialectic of concealment and revelation. Unlike prior scholarship, which situates Underworld within Cold War historiography or postmodern historiographical critique, this research foregrounds its mythological dimensions, tracing how DeLillo appropriates and reconfigures ancient descent narratives to critique modernity’s crisis of memory, control, and ideological stratification. Ultimately, Underworld challenges linear historical frameworks, offering a counter-history that amplifies the voices of the forgotten and destabilizes the boundaries between past and present, surface and depth, official record and suppressed truth.