Videotape Don Delillo Summary

In Videotape Don DeLillo mentions, “Seeing someone at the moment he dies, dying unexpectedly. It demonstrates an elemental truth, that every breath you take has two possible endings.”. Don DeLillo wrote his fiction stories basing himself on the dangerous world around him. Videotape shows how life is like a breath of air you remain alive or is your last breath, very important elements that DeLillo use is setting, character, theme. In the story Videotape by Don DeLillo, we get catch by a story where a man gets hypnotize by a shocking footage that is play over and over on the news. The video is about a girl who was recording and the man who was a stranger in a car. In the car trip she started to record in her video camera a man who was driving a dodge that was behind her, the man was very nice and wave back to her as he was driving. While recording in an instance the man was shot in the head by an anonymous killer that was called the “Texas Highway Killer”. The little girl was in shock continuing recording the man whose life out of nowhere ended.

From the start the narrator is so drawn to the footage shown in the news, it’s not his first time that he watches this video, he knows exactly what is going to happen every time, but he can’t get over it. The narrator watching the footage was mesmerized and in shock that he almost forced his wife to watch the video with him. “It shows something awful and unaccompanied. You want your wife to see it because it is real this time, not fancy movie violence the realness beneath the layers of cosmetic perception” narrator represents when society watches an act of violence observing life’s taken away. The case in the story Videotape the narrator can’t cope that he spots how an innocent girl recorded a life that was taken away in a blink of an