Suicide and the Afterlife of the Cold War: Accident, Intentionality, and Periodicity in Paul Auster's Leviathan and Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides

Leviathan and The Virgin Suicides aestheticize the contradictory politics that Ronald Reagan laid forth in his presidency. With their representations of paradoxical events and the shared desire of their characters to simultaneously construct two (or more) mutually exclusive narratives of historical events, these novels depict interpretive acts in a liminal aesthetics that draws on both modernist and postmodernist techniques. The synthesis of such techniques challenges critical understandings of the aesthetic and political distinctions between modernism and postmodernism.