The album is explored through the lens of dreams, presenting three distinct interpretations. It delves into murder ballads featuring a killer facing execution, serves as a religious allegory highlighting a struggle between salvation and damnation, and reflects on the intersections of race and music in America. Each layer offers a profound commentary on the human experience, making it a rich subject for analysis.
Don DeLillo has spent his career reflecting upon the creative processes of artists. In recent years he has become increasingly drawn to spectators and how they project and indulge their own private obsessions through art. The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo is the first book devoted to this dimension of DeLillo's art. It is also the first book to identify and analyze a signature DeLillo motif: the embedded author. In multiple novels, short stories, and plays, DeLillo inserts a character subtly implied as the creator of the very narrative we are reading or watching. Spanning his entire career but focusing primarily on his work from Underworld (1997) to Zero K (2016), The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo breaks important new ground in DeLillo studies.