Don DeLillo's Zero K (2016) explores how the wealthy confront the end of the world through cryopreservation. While previous scholarship has examined the novel through posthumanist, existentialist, and post-secularist lenses, little attention has been given to DeLillo's portrayal of the 2014 annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation. Drawing on the author's comment that the world is in the midst of a Third World War, and considering that he revisited this theme in "Human Moments in World War III" (1983) and Silence (2020), this paper brings the three works into dialogue for the first time in DeLillo scholarship. It investigates how one of America's most established novelists has depicted World War III over the past forty years and what these shifts signify. Focusing first on "Human Moments" and Zero K, this paper reveals that although the texts emerge from distinct contexts—the US–Soviet space race and the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian conflict—DeLillo's depictions of global war share crucial features: distance from the battlefield and an emphasis on watching, both evocative of American civilians' experiences of war since World War I. Turning to the latest novel, Silence, the paper examines how China's technological rise is imagined as peace-threatening and how Sinophobia circulated in the US during Donald Trump's first presidency. Through this comparative analysis, the presentation demonstrates a new intertextuality among DeLillo's works and situates his evolving World War III narratives within broader geopolitical concerns, offering insight into how his fiction reflects and refracts shifting perceptions of global conflict.

Authors:
Lijun Wang, Otemon Gakuin University, Japan

About the Presenter(s)
Lijun Wang is a lecturer at Otemon Gakuin University, Japan. Before joining Otemon, she was a doctoral student at Osaka University. She is currently working on her dissertation on representations of war and the Other in Don DeLillo's novels.

Additional website of interest
https://researchmap.jp/lijunwang

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