ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes a short story about a music teacher who suffers from a pathological fear of the aftershocks of an earthquake. I focus on the construction of the narrative space of the story. Narrative space in “The Ivory Acrobat” consists of the representation of the egocentric spatial experience of the protagonist, which keeps narrowing as her anxiety gets worse and worse. The short story can be read as the “fictional expression” of an unstable psychological state, which is enacted through the body of a character. Here, by concentrating on characters’ bodies, DeLillo is “abandoning meaning,” reaching beyond symbolic systems. It is argued that due to this, while the effect is created at the expense of symbolic, narrative meaning, DeLillo's writing strategy largely contributes to the reader's experience of (the pace of) the story.
