Eric And Benno Levin In Don Delillo's Cosmopolis

773 Words4 Pages

In Don Delillo’s novel Cosmopolis, we get to see a day in the protagonist’s life. All the odd interactions with his wife and his daily health check ups are described to us in this book. The character that he encounters that is the most crucial for the development of the story is Benno Levin, we get glimpses of who this character is throughout this novel however, we do not get to see how significant he truly is until the last part of the story. Eric Packer seems to have plenty in common with Benno Levin, the similarities between both of these characters leads to a conflict at the end of the novel. None of the characters that the protagonist encounters appear to be as influential as Benno Levin even though they only share a small portion of the novel conversing. It is quite interesting to find out that both Eric and Benno have asymmetrical prostates, both of these characters are extremely similar “‘My …show more content…

Benno Levin would be Eric Packer’s impulsive and more “human” side. This would explain the conflict that they have between each other. Benno Levin is convinced that he is being neglected and he is looking for attention and recognition from Eric Packer who does not give him that at all. “Means nothing to me” (DeLillo 192) was Eric’s response to Benno telling him what his old name was. If we see this Benno Levin character as Eric Packer’s secondary personality, killing Eric Packer is the only way to simply be Benno Levin “Now I’m in a position where I can talk to his corpse. He can’t tell me this or that is the case or I am shaming myself or fooling myself” (DeLillo 56). To me is an internal conflict, it is about Benno trying to get rid of Eric to take his place. Their asymmetrical prostates and their opposite yet similar characteristics are what led me to believe that they were two personalities in a single