Leviathan (Auster novel) building accidentally went off. According to the forensic reports that have just been published, the man was killed instantly. His body burst into dozens of small pieces, and fragments of his corpse were found as far as fifty feet away from the site of the explosion. —"Leviathan" Through his own investigations, the narrator attempts to answer questions as to who the man was who blew himself up, why he was found with a homemade bomb, and what circumstances brought him to a violent end. "Leviathan" is borrowed from the biblical sea monster that Thomas Hobbes used as a metaphor for
SS Leviathan SS Leviathan SS Leviathan, originally built as Vaterland, was an ocean liner which regularly crossed the North Atlantic from 1914 to 1934. The second of three sister ships built for Germany's Hamburg America Line for their transatlantic passenger service, she sailed as "Vaterland" for less than a year before her early career was halted by the start of World War I. In 1917, she was seized by the U.S. government and renamed "Leviathan". She would become known by this name for the majority of her career, both as a troopship during World War I and later as the flagship of