The Identity of Crowds

It seems as though most people are concentrating on the theme of crowds in Delillo’s Mao II, and for good reason, as it seems to be one that dominates the novel. It starts with the mass marriage that includes Karen, amongst thousands of others taking part in the ceremony of the Unification church. Here, the narrator describes the crowd with a foreboding tone, suggesting the dangerous implications it might have. Though, not in the mob-mentality type of danger one would instinctively associate with dangerous crowds. No, the narrator is referring to a much more subtle kind of danger in the fact that everyone is losing their identity, their ability to reason in being a part of this crowd. Delillo describes this crowd as made up of “living beings” who “are a nation…founded on the principle of easy belief.”(7) At the end of the prologue, Delillo also eerily claims, “The future belongs to crowds.”(16) These words on their own are not so eery, but when juxtaposed with the photograph on the following page of a tightly packed and anxious crowd of young boys.

Though not so many literal allusions to crowds persist in Part One, we can still see it in the narrative style of the novel. It is third person omniscient in that it knows all the perceptions of each character, but unlike most third person omniscient narratives, this narrator is allowed deep within the thoughts of each character, no matter how insignificant or important they might be. These different perspectives are not neatly contained within their own chapter as in other novels that play with omniscience in this way, but all jumbled up, sometimes within the same paragraph. In the opening of chapter six, we are guided through the flashback by Scott’s perspective, as it is he who, “wonders,” “remembers” and “was glad.”(76) And then, without any warning, Karen is owner of the story, because we know that she “often thought of her husband, Kim” and that “she believed deeply in Master.”(78) And then Brita’s perspective dominates and then Bill’s, and the perspective changes back and forth constantly until it is so mixed up that it becomes everyone’s story. In doing this, Delillo is creating the sense that the crowd is narrating the novel, the most creepy effect of this being that the reader feels as though the crowd is inside one’s own mind. I also get the sense that this is how Bill Gray must feel as an author, and is the reason for his intense seclusion. He tells Brita that  he feels “One of my failings is that I say things to strangers…that I’ve never said to a wife or a child, a close friend.”(38) I interpret this to mean that because speaks to crowds (or audiences) full of strangers, he has nothing to say to the people about whom he really cares. In this sense, Bill is somewhat similar to Karen, in that he loses his identity to massive crowds.