Abstract
This essay considers the allegorical signification of media in Don DeLillo’s Body Artist (2002), a short novel that details a life of a recently widowed protagonist Lauren. I closely examine the way in which various types of media, especially the Internet, deeply affect her melancholy, blurring her distinction between the factual and the virtual, by focusing on her conceptual framework of “possession.” That she often confuses physical possession of body/things with virtual possession of images/concepts symbolizes the extent to which hypermedia affects her perceptions. Lauren’s melancholy allegorically represents an irremediable dissociation between the tactile reality and virtual images in the age of hypermedia.
