American Exceptionalism and the Historical Fiction of Chabon and DeLillo: Media Identity Commodification and the Truth of Lies

At the heart of any democratic nation lie the individuals that inhabit its borders, heed allegiance to its flag, comprise its political and economical bodies, and fight the very wars that disrupt its political ideals. Max Weber, who is revered not merely as a great sociologist, but the sociologist, contends that any sociological explanation regarding the w1derlying will and motives of these individuals must relate to their self-conscious actions. But, however self-conscious these actions may appear, they are decidedly influenced by external factors, and, as will be shown, a well-constructed novel captures the interplay between the individual, the nation, and these influential external factors as they all come together to form a discernible national identity. Therefore, I will be looking backwards at the foundational and seminal studies of the past while simultaneously examining the present and heuristically conjecturing about the future to extract the essence of' American culture and national identity, with much of my research ultimately exploring the role of the novel in this construction. This project will uncover how Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Kavalier) and Don DeLillo's Underworld adumbrate the changes of globalization, the fall of the Iron Curtain, and the rise of America as the world's superpower, as relevant to the idea of American Exceptionalism (AE). By first establishing the historical and theoretical background of how such national identities are formed, and briefly examining how globalization challenges these paradigms, this paper will focus on the historio-political narratives of Chaban and DeLillo as their novels brilliantly expound on what it means to be an American. And this is why these novels bear such cultural weight; Kavalier, if absolutely distilled, is about reinvigorating a belief in the American Dream in the America of today, and Underworld complements Chabon's novel so fittingly because it illuminates the necessity of capitalism for the parturition of such a dream. Their engaging prose engage history as a mechanism to inform the reader, while their storylines reinvigorate middle class superiority, and this culminates as the belief in the possibility for this dream to exist in the present and the future.