Who Is Don Delillo's Omega Point?

Don DeLillo, born in 1936, remains a powerful voice in American literature. His novel, Omega Point, takes its title from the work of a French Jesuit priest and philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Chardin created the term as a way of defining the highest level of consciousness (Harrison, 2014, NP). The Omega Point, a kind of spiritual moment, exists separately from the bounds of time and space. In DeLillo’s work, the Omega Point seems less transcendent and more of an endpoint. The book’s three central characters find their own omega points. Time seems to stop and "the mind transcends all direction inward." Jim Finley, the novel’s narrator, works as a filmmaker. His task in the book is to get "defense intellectual" Richard Elster to agree

One of the most interesting ideas in Omega Point is that many people who do and oversee terrible violence seem incapable of really understanding what lies under these conflicts. It says something really interesting about violence in general; people (psychopaths aside) rarely enact violence with premeditation. Violence is elemental and physical and impulsive, except, of course, for the violence of war. Elster seems to get that and refuses, despite Finley demands, to give tidy explanations for what war means. War basically turns generals and soldiers into killers. It makes them consider the best way to end people’s lives, and the methods available are messy and imprecise. They kill and maim and paralyze and the PTSD people carry away makes them relive the violence done to them over and over throughout their lives. Elster resists when Finley tries to pry an explanation from him. "It 's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself," Elster says. Elster does not describe violence or explain it, and he seems mostly glib. There is a moment of real truth, though, when he explains his idea of a personal omega point. He thinks this point is a kind of oblivion, a state of nonexistence. "Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field" (DeLillo, 2010, p.

Omega Point examines the way people relate to violence and how they contemplate death. Rather than greater understanding, of the kind of sublime moment that the philosopher who coined the term viewed it as, DeLillo’s omega point is a hard end, but also a kind of sublime protection. Every fate Elster contemplates, seems worse than actual death though Elster is understandably frightened of how he will move from alive to not. Jessie seems to embrace death as a protective space, too, though the manner of her death works against DeLillo’s thematic work although some might say that suicide is terrible violence, too. Robert Frost said there were no beginnings and no ends – just “middles.” DeLillo seems to think that the only real thing at all is the end and that that end is infinite, dark and