Post-National American Dreaming in Joseph O'Neill's Netherland: The Adversity of Hans van den Broek

Abstract

Netherland has received much praise for its original approach to the events of 11 September 2001, particularly for its deterritorialization of established narratives of nationhood into an immigrant community and global setting, which to many critics signals a much-needed break from unilateral accounts of trauma and a significant repositioning of the American nation toward the world. At the same time, the novel also remains deeply indebted to key tropes of the national imagination, particularly the notion of the American Dream and American exceptionalism, even as it attributes them to the immigrant dreamer. This article examines the complex relation of the national to the post-national in O'Neill's novel and the role it plays in the narrator-protagonist Hans van den Broek's narrative framing of his—and by extension, the nation's—experience of trauma.