“ DeLillo’s parataxis can tell us how his characters might think, or avoid thinking, as in this characteristic sentence about American nuclear weapons researchers:
“They came to do science in New Mexico during the war, an overnight sprawl of trailers and hutments, and they ate the local grub and played poker once a week and went to the Saturday square dance and worked on the thing with no name, the bomb that would redefine the limits of human perception and dread.”
In the very syntax, the “bombheads” (as they are called) devote themselves to refining apocalyptic weaponry as readily as they adopt local pleasures and pastimes.
Parataxis gives DeLillo’s prose its particular rhythm, often blankly reporting the hardly intelligible facets of urban life. [..]
Underworld… likes verbless sentences and descriptions that merely collect things. While concerned with hidden connections and beguiling conspiracy theories, at eye level it is disconnected. Parataxis performs the disconnection, catching at fragments. No wonder that, for DeLillo’s characters, paranoia is such a solace.
“They came to do science in New Mexico during the war, an overnight sprawl of trailers and hutments, and they ate the local grub and played poker once a week and went to the Saturday square dance and worked on the thing with no name, the bomb that would redefine the limits of human perception and dread.”
In the very syntax, the “bombheads” (as they are called) devote themselves to refining apocalyptic weaponry as readily as they adopt local pleasures and pastimes.
Parataxis gives DeLillo’s prose its particular rhythm, often blankly reporting the hardly intelligible facets of urban life. [..]
Underworld… likes verbless sentences and descriptions that merely collect things. While concerned with hidden connections and beguiling conspiracy theories, at eye level it is disconnected. Parataxis performs the disconnection, catching at fragments. No wonder that, for DeLillo’s characters, paranoia is such a solace.
— John Mullan, “And then he ate the apple…” The Guardian (2 August 2003).
