Introduction
The scholarly discussion concerning ideas related to history and the novel proved to be of a particular interest to postmodern critics and writers who usually reflect such ideas in their works. This scholarly discussion forms the background of my research, for the book on which my research is based, is a representation of the postmodern fictional-writings on history. Don DeLillo as a postmodern writer depicts, in his novel Libra, the President John F. Kennedy’s assassination but at the same time he blurs the lines between this real event and the fictional world in which it is presented to create a new reality out of it.
Postmodern critics and writers, including Don DeLillo questioned the traditional distinctions between binary oppositions they considered irrelevant. These binaries include history and literature, fact and fiction, and reality and imagination to mention just a few. According to them there shouldn’t be a distinction between these notions, rather they should be put together and presented as a whole to create a unified picture and a better understanding of, for example, history. Aside from these binaries, postmodernists have questioned two important notions that were set by the enlightenment thinkers and that are closely related to our understanding of the relationship between history on the one hand and fiction on the other as presented by Don DeLillo. These notions are ‘positivist history’ and ‘the universal subject’.
Positivist history is the