Society vs. the Individual: A Reflection and Analysis of The Names by Don Delillo

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Language and politics, unlike the individuality of the human mind where anything can be expressed, can not stand alone; it needs people to set its limitations, it needs rules. It was this “setting of limits that [James] thought he needed” in the beginning (192). If you think about the rules of conversation in society, you’ll find that a majority of the time, depending on whom you’re speaking to, there are things you can and can not say because they may be socially inappropriate or politically incorrect, there are parts of ourselves that we are simply not allowed to reveal. The same can be said for the rules of violence--one needs revenge, which is like a routine ritual, “like a religious experience,” but without the “revenge motive…the violent act is sickly” and mad (202).

The Cult is where James finds such kind of madness, where he finds a lack of routine--“one mind, one madness,” as Owen puts it, “And where’s the ritual in their sacrifice? Old man hammered to death. No sign of ritual” (116). The Cult strayed away from routine and dealt with “place-names with the same set of letters, rearranged. And it was precisely a rearrangement, a reordering” (76).  As a foreigner, whose away from his family, in the company of detached dinner companions, he finds the only people he can actually connect with are the people of the Cult, possibly because they have managed to express the madness in their minds, they’ve managed to express the present individual self, which is the self that James seeks. “These killings mock us,” Owen tells James, “They mock our need to structure and classify, to build a system against the terror in our souls. The means to contend with death has become death. They intended nothing, they meant nothing” (308). There is no meaning to the Cult’s actions, “they killed because the letter’s matched”; if they had a meaning, they would have to have limitations.

The Cult, James comes to realize, had discovered a way to escape the world and were operating through solely the mind, where the inner self resides; they were not held back by the forces of language or politics. One of the reasons why the Cult would never allow Voltarra to film the killings, among more obvious reasons, is that although the language of film creates consciousness, film represents social identity--people interacting with each other--not individual identity. Although the Cult act together in a group, the experience is individual--this is parallel to James’s experience by the end of the novel in which he visits the Parthenon and finds that people come in groups but they discover their own “voice” (338). The bestiality of the Cult’s actions, moreover, begs the question of whether or not the inner self is evil? And if so, is that why it’s so restrained by other forces? Are we afraid of ourselves? Do we fear our own depravities?

In order to discover who he is and engage in his inner self, James needed to look past his depravities, fears, to stop “arrang[ing his] life around things [he] couldn’t possibly fear losing,” desire for self-importance, going back to self-delusion, and escape his group identity (ie. American deceptionism and imperialism) --these are possibly the “obligations” he spoke of that are “attached“ to visiting the Parthenon (127, 1).  Even in the Parthenon, he comes back to the realization that language is like an object we create--it doesn’t hold us, we hold it--and therefore it is “[o]ur offering” as a group. It’s only in the Parthenon, he is finally “surprised” by life, he steps away from routine. He  discovers who he is--his own “voice”-- and finds what Andahl was searching for--“a cry for pity,” and a need to be released from one’s flaws.

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Reference : Delillo, D. (1982). The Names. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Article by Farhana Uddin

Farhana Uddin is a freelance writer finishing off her B.A. in English at the University of Texas at Austin. She has experience as an editorial assistant and is currently helping put together a new creative journal for UT Austin English major undergraduates.

Other articles by Farhana Uddin housed at ArticleMyriad include :

Society Versus the Individual : A Reflection on The Names by Don Delillo

"In This Way We are Wise" and the Wisdom of Nathan Englander