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Nietzsche believes that man’s behavior is instinctively related to this need for survival. Superior men are realistic; they know that they would have to face the competitive struggle with their eyes open and their hearts under control. They prefer to not exhibit any form of sentimentality and attachment, choosing rather to perform actions that are needed, however immoral. The weaker man, on the other hand, resorts to idealistic concepts to camouflage the fear and the anger that they are wholly inadequate to deal with the situation. Since the majority of the group falls into this category, they find it easier to commiserate in their inadequacy together and as a precaution, put out vague ideas as required for life. It is based on this that Nietzsche critiques the idea of Morality.
Morality, according to Nietzsche, is born from denial. He explains this idea using the parable of the lambs and the birds of prey. Birds see lambs as their natural inferiors, as meat. The lambs are angered by this but are unable to remedy this situation except to express anger. They criticize the birds and hold them morally responsible for their ‘evil’ conduct. They project an ideology of morality that arises in connection with dissatisfaction and hatred. Through Christianity, Nietzsche believes that a ‘priestly caste’ has taken over culture, and their ideology of morality has now become the dominant view. Nietzsche believes that the idea of morality besides being unbearable, also promises terrible consequences for human culture as it lauds weakness and illness that chokes off genuine human achievement.
The practice of Will to Power is the source from which all questions of morality emerge into the discourse. To say that a man should do whatever is necessary to gain what he desires, is according to traditional philosophy, a highly immoralistic thing to say. But, Nietzsche challenges that notion saying that need outweighs how things are done. He goes on to say, that being morally bound will not get things done. Power, in his estimate, is more important than morality.
Morality is tied to obligation, with codes and rules governing every bit of action. If Power is to reach its full realization, then morality needs to be shunted aside. For a man who advocated Moral Relativism, this emphasis on codes, structures, and oppositions is unacceptable. His idea of a perfect man may not subscribe to it because “There are no moral facts,” but instead there is only continued interpretation without the promise of a singular truth. Just because Nietzsche seems to refute the arguments of established ethics, it cannot be said that he does not possess a particular morality.
His Morality is controversial. It is humanistic, while also being individualistic. He is also very much the philosopher of anti-morality, for whom, as for Machiavelli, power, strength, dominance, and control are the highest virtues. Virtues like sympathy, pity, generosity, and equality are all terms that he rebuts. They are not traits that he would associate with his conception of a noble human being for to him a perfect human being is adept at manipulation, not afraid to exhibit his supremacy and praise of himself.
It is, therefore, easy to brand Nietzschean morality as selfish and lacking in the all-important metaphysical ideals. The common argument is also that he offers no values. Yet he begs to differ, as in his estimate, values do exist; it just comes down to countering the commonly accepted notions of Morality, Nietzsche advocates the importance of Master Morality and Slave Morality. The superior man subscribes to this master morality, where importance is on property, rules, rights, and obligations. If this is the case, then within a medieval scenario, there are two existing kinds of master morality: the “knightly” and “priestly” of which he favors the former while despising the latter, for its help in the facilitation of the slave morality. This Master Morality is also a life-affirming one, which regards as good the manifestations of power and the realization of one’s noble, superior status. Masters are uninhibited, bold, open, and lacking in self-doubt. They do not put constraints on how they seek their ends and do what is necessary to get what they want.
Slave morality, on the other hand, is based on the resentment that the powerless feel toward the powerful. It is a morality that Nietzsche detests, as the morality of most philosophers and most religions. In his estimate, a Slave morality is a morality of excuses because they lack the strength, the courage, and the guts to attain most of the best that life has to offer, the weak develop a ‘sour grapes’ attitude toward power, wealth, and success in general, choosing instead to extol the virtues of restraint, patience, consideration, altruism, meekness, suffering, and so on. The only way they can feel any self-worth at all is by insisting that the superior men are corrupt and evil, all because they do not subscribe to their ideology. This Slave morality is, to Nietzsche, a sickening rationalization of weakness, propagated by philosophers like Aristotle, and Plato.
In Nietzsche’s view, those who extol the virtues of the Master Morality stand beyond good and evil. He further justifies this idea by citing the example of the barbarians, who through the power of their will and desire for power, preyed upon the weaker societies and conquered them. He also references ancient Greek and Roman Civilizations, where morality was only the performance of one’s duty and the realization of manhood. Within this scenario, power was a dominant principle whose maintenance allowed a glorification of death, killing, and ego. Examples of this are found in The Iliad and The Odyssey, where characters kill, but are yet considered heroes and are glorified. Thus, he equates the Master Morality with the original, animal, or Natural Morality which is instinctual and emphasizes strength, vitality, winning, and power.
Like Camus, Nietzsche, and Sartre, Don DeLillo has brought out existential ideas in his novels. He has positioned himself in a postmodern world with a relative ease and penchant for modern realism. Further, he exhibits a ‘perpetual quest for reality’. Don DeLillo’s career as a fiction writer began in the year 1960 with the publication of a short story “The River Jordan” in Epoch. Only two years before, in 1958, he passed out of Fordham University with a degree in communication arts. After a short stint as a copywriter for Ogilvie & Mather advertisement agency, Don DeLillo took his irreversible and somehow inexorable steps towards a full-fledged career as a writer. He has written violent thrillers and conspiracy theory novels, sports, and science fiction novels, he has obsessed over pop music, advertising, futurism, military tactics, film, and television.
Nevertheless, he had to wait for nearly eleven years before his first novel Americana appeared in 1971. His short stories kept appearing at regular intervals in Epoch, Kenyon Review, and Carolina Quarterly. Many critics uniformly express their inability to categorize or bracket Don DeLillo with any of the contemporary writers. Though Don DeLillo situates his narrative somewhere between a diegetic and a mimetic text, he freely indulges in genre splicing. Without getting into an abstraction, his novels locate the characters and events in the post-war American culture. His fondness for empirical details is nothing but an attempt in the direction of a sophisticated representation of reality. The motifs and subject matters are contiguous as Don DeLillo’s narratives without moralizing the American way of life-baseball, rock music, pornography, drugs, stock exchange, shopping malls, homegrown terrorism, boredom, homosexuality, fancy cars, Hollywood films, cult groups, television, advertisement, espionage and so on. Don DeLillo readily attests to the notion of the spirit of the time.
Although Don DeLillo has experimented with different subjects and themes in his writings, his depiction of the social and political history of America has always been the subject of his interest. He is a versatile American writer. He is a popular postmodernist novelist, playwright, and essayist. He was born in 1936, in New York. His writings include the most serious, debatable, and controversial subjects themes of his writings as international politics, terrorism, and the Cold War that is widely reflected in his writings. DeLillo’s early novels include Americana (1971) and End Zone (1972), White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), and Mao II (1991). One of the best novels Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1998) is one of the most critical writings, through this novel DeLillo came into light and became popular. His Body Artist (2001) and Cosmopolis (2003) also achieved a place in the reading list of his twenty-first-century novel but he gained popularity with his Falling Man (2007) which is an orientalist narrative of traumatic 9/11. The novel gives a sense of catharsis and releases the pain of the people of the oriental discourse of terrorism. It seems to some of the literary critics that the writings of DeLillo lack a sense of humour and artistic skill but his narrative techniques are par excellence. He received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award in 2012 and a Medal in 2015 for American letters. His recent novels are Point Omega (2010) and Zero K (2016).
Americana, Don DeLillo’s first novel, was published in the year 1971. Though it did not receive raving reviews, it heralded the arrival of a writer given to genre experimentation. The novel is divided into four parts. Each part explains about the protagonist’s self and the way he finds meaning in his life. The first portion examines the present life of the main character as a young Television Executive in the network office. The second explains the childhood days of the central character along with his father, mother, and his sisters Jane and Mary. The third part examines his journey towards Navaho’s project. The main aim of the project is to understand the primitives. In this part, he decides to transcendent his self by creating an autobiographical film. In the fourth part, David found meaning in his life but lost his job. He realizes himself and decides to leave everyone from the camper and move alone. In the end, David understands the true meaning of life and decides to move life with his ex-wife Meredith.
Don DeLillo’s End Zone (1972) at first appears to be very different from Americana (1971). Americana is a big, sprawling book, expansive in scope and extravagant in language, whereas End Zone is compact, narrowly focused, and terse almost to the point of being epigrammatic. On first reading, End Zone (1972) appears to be radically different in theme also. Tom LeClair, in In the Loop, focuses on this difference.
DeLillo uses End Zone (1972) to examine a wide range of subjects: games, especially football; the nature of language, especially the specialized languages of science, warfare, and sport; the nature of power in patriarchal culture; paranoid political movements; nuclear warfare; the ideology of beauty.
The novel is divided into three parts. The first part explains Gary Harkness’s football practice with the teammates along with senior coach Creed, a new person who joins the college Taft Robinson, and Gary’s relationship with his friend Myrna Corbett. The second part manifests itself as the narrative which explains the big game between logos and Centrex. The third part explains Gary Harkness’s experience of depression, alienation, search for self, death of Mrs.Tom Wade, president of Logos College, unhealthy senior coach Creed, and Taft Robinson’s decision to give up football.
When his second novel End Zone was published in 1972 Don DeLillo had already been well acquainted with American concerns, predicament, and premonition. Don DeLillo himself called it a novel ‘about extreme places and extreme states of mind’. The novel is ‘plotless and static’ and a series of deaths intrude violently into the narrative.
The assassination of President Kennedy, McCarthyism, the communist revolution in America’s backyard like Cuba, the Bay of Pigs incident and of course, conscription for the unpopular Vietnam War and his financial grappling in a small tenement in the Bronx, had left Don DeLillo antsy for a long time. As a result, this novel too does not escape an “ostentatiously gloomy view of American life and culture”. The first two novels are easily forgettable for there are no plots and stories worth remembering. Yet, these two novels are rich in images of contemporary American life, which Raymond Williams may call a ‘social documentary’. The coalescing of different areas of American experience into a unified narrative shows the creative acumen of the writer.
Don DeLillo’s 1973 novel Great Jones Street builds on a choice bit of information like Bob Dylan’s famous Basement tapes. Branded as a rock novel, it explores the life of Bucky Wunderlick who is caught between creativity and nihilism. Don DeLillo himself has described Bucky as a man “at a crossroads between murder and suicide.
In 1976, Ratner’s Star, a ‘jaco-serious’ science fiction appeared. Space missions, moon landings, sprawling military-industrial complexes, and the functioning of the Las Alamos laboratory mystified and tantalized Don DeLillo. There was a burst of creative energy in this period of Don DeLillo’s life and in the next year that was in 1977, he published Players, a novel about a young New York couple-Lyle Wynant and his wife Pammy. Don DeLillo also brings to the reader’s focus the taboo subject of sexual orientation and society’s moral assumptions.
Publication of novels became an annual affair and in 1978 Running Dog, a dark novel about a spy, hit the bookstands. Cold War era had its military and intelligence covert operations during which operatives and backwoodsmen were killed without remorse or compunction. He handles the subject of espionage, dangerous liaisons, and terror tactics with a panache and finesse that only a master storyteller is capable of. Radial Matrix, a shadowy government organization, and a senator and his prurient interest become the subjects of interest in this novel. By opting for a theme that appears just as an extension to the theme in players Don DeLillo seems to concur with Rene Welleks’s contention that realism is ‘the objective representation of contemporary social reality’.
In 1980, Don DeLillo followed it up with a novel titled Amazons, He used the pseudonym, Cleo Birdwell. The novel centers on a woman character who plays in the National Hockey League. The year 1982 saw the publication of his next novel The Names. Staying in an apartment in the city of Athens near Mount Lykabettos, he wrote this linguistically exuberant and culturally dense novel. His obsession with patterns continues in this novel also.
After a hiatus of three years, Don DeLillo’s commercially successful novel White Noise was published in 1985. The significance of the novel is well brought out by its title which means a sound across a wide range of frequencies capable of blocking out other noises. In the novel, incidents and happenings including the “airborne toxic event” are erased by minatory media images. More importantly, the characters are unbelievable and they engage themselves in activities and dialogues that are contrived and confounding.
Libra, the next novel, published in the year 1988 became an instant bestseller and made it to The New York Times Best Seller List. Don DeLillo’s tenth novel Mao II appeared in 1991. Inspired by Andy Warhol, the pop artist and publicist known for his pencil drawing of Mao Zedong titled as Mao II. Don DeLillo creates a character in Bill Gray who is an antithetical picture of the famous artist.
Don DeLillo’s Underworld, dubbed variously as a ‘millennial tome’ was published in 1997. Its 837 pages are pure delight as it covers the long sweep of American life spread over fifty years. Don DeLillo’s novel has a free motif. But, they are essentially American. To create empirical credibility Don DeLillo structures the novels with liberal use of American ideology and iconology.
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