Ethnic Irony in Don DeLillo’s "Underworld": A Counter-Narrative of the Italian American Resilience and Vulnerabilities.

The parable of Nick Shay, the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s Underworld, “olive-skinned, dark” (DeLillo 2011, 64) as his missing Italian father, can be read as a felicitous example of a descendant of immigrants who succeeded in “making America.” He represents an instance of upward (and westward) mobility, a self-made man who travels west from Little Italy in New York to run an international waste company in Phoenix, Arizona (DeLillo 2011). By distancing the narrator from the Bronx, which nonetheless represents the unquestionable point of gravity of the novel and Nick’s very identity, DeLillo creates the space essential for irony, the space “between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now,” as another character DeLillo’s character, Jack Gladney, suggests (DeLillo 2009, 30). In DeLillo’s Underworld, the irony indeed represents a fundamental strategy that enables Nick to face the trauma of his brutal separation from his father and his milieu, to reappropriate the persistent commonplaces regarding the Italian Americans (such as the gangster, the unclean, and the Latin lover) in order to deconstruct and to rewrite them, to normalize the ethnic identity and to try to reconcile with it during the journey towards Nick’s intimate past.