“[R]adiance in dailiness”: The Uncanny Ordinary in Don DeLillo's Zero K

Abstract

In Zero K, Don DeLillo relies on the uncanny to investigate the limits of the human condition and to bridge the tension between the transcendental and the everyday. The novel's narrator, Jeff Lockhart, offers readers a tour of the underworld in his visits to the Convergence, a cryonics facility where mannequins and frozen bodies blur the boundaries between life and death. The Convergence's promise of crystalline language, transcendent truth, and immortality is revealed to be a form of skepticism that prevents us from seeing the extraordinariness of the ordinary. An uncanny engagement with the "radiance in dailiness" allows Jeff to escape the solipsism that defines so many of DeLillo's characters and to join the community of humans, linked by finitude and solitude.

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