“Cosmopolis” (novel) –Don DeLillo a Theater of the Absurd Existentialist, nevertheless a Bronx southern-Italian American

“What are you doing Saturday night? / Committing suicide / What about Friday?” (Woody Allen) ... Richard E. Baker in his book “The Dynamics of the Absurd in the Existentialist Novel” writes: “Many existentialist writers in the twentieth century have defined the sense of the absurd... Miguel de Unamuno says it is the ‘tragic sense of life’; JeanPaul Sartre calls it ‘nausea’... [etc].” By any name, the ‘absurd’ denotes the experience of a rational individual struggling with a perceived irrational world. Increasingly, I’m coming to the opinion that Don Delillo should be added to that long list which includes Richard Wright, Camus, Beckett, etc. What interests me is how the son of Abruzzo immigrants goes from ‘hanging’ on a Little Italy Bronx street corner to “Waiting for Godot”, and what that ‘trip’ implies about the culture of post-Little Italy Americana