Dysfunctional Communication
The characters in this novel struggle to communicate with one another because of dysfunction, some intentional and some not. For his part, Elster is aging and gradually losing touch with the outside world. At face value this seems like a harsh judgement to lay upon the man, but he is self-identifying as a recluse. He's grown increasingly disgusted with people as he dives further into this haiku business. He and Jim continue to miss each other as they talk.
Jim views the world through such a different lens -- generationally, artistically, philosophically, and politically. While Jim views Elster's life as a living document, he fails to see sometimes how the older man is suffering. When Jessie arrives, she adds the additional dysfunction of social impairment. Although not explicitly stated, it's likely, given contextual clues, that Jessie is on the spectrum. She both complicates the two men's somewhat unintentionally intimate relationship with her femininity and compliments their mutual goals by lending context and compassion.
Suppressed Anger
Elster is in his seventies by the time he is approached by the government once more to complete this project. He's drawing up a document about war, essentially a distilled tag line which can explain to soldiers in brief what to expect and how to prepare. His mission is war. After his own experiences with the military, Elster is particularly well suited for the project, hence his being asked despite being well into his retirement.
As he deliberately recalls his wartime experiences, Elster is overcome by a rising anger. Jim and Jessie both notice. In his need to fulfill his duty, Elster had suppressed much of the horror and pain of that time, which now has surfaced once more as anger. He despises war and all the incomprehensible vast horror which it brought into his own and other people's lives. This is what he tries to communicate via the haiku. Before the war, Elster was a peaceable outdoorsman, content to spend extended periods of time alone in nature. Afterwards, he still retreated into nature, but the rhythms seemed forever changed to him. He could no longer find serenity or bliss in the natural world, instead continually brooding over how far humanity had drifted from this sort of innate harmony.
Life As Art
In this novel, DeLillo makes some intriguing assertions about his own artistic philosophy. He writes about art as if it seeks only to portray the real and about life as if is merely a manifestation of artistic potential. From the start Elster makes clear that his mission is secret, but he also welcomes Jim into his life. Jim maintains a professional and friendly relationship with Elster in order to document his life as a film. He wants to make a one-take film just depicting Elster in his solitude, against a natural backdrop. Clearly he sees the older man's life as a living art piece.
For his part, however, Elster flips the medium. He devotes himself to writing this haiku which is supposed to comprise the extent of his own experiences in war, in an accessible and generic way. His life is reduced to an extremely limiting, compressed artistic format. All of this complexity of thought actually becomes secondary when considered within the context of Jessie's arrival. She possesses no love of art nor interest in transforming her pain. She draws in the element of the real, reading as a decisive, if somewhat understated character. Essentially her character reminds the reader that characters exist, in turn pointing back toward DeLillo's authorship. Within the context of a fictional text -- a creative work, -- the conversation surrounding the interchangeable nature of real life and art becomes appropriately weighty. This is DeLillo, in fact, devoting his own life to writing about how life relates to art.
