Hubbry Logo
End ZoneEnd ZoneMain
Open search
End Zone
Community hub
End Zone
logo
7 pages, 0 posts
0 subscribers
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
End Zone
End Zone
End Zone
View on Wikipedia
from Wikipedia

End Zone is Don DeLillo's second novel, published in 1972.[1]

Key Information

It is a light-hearted farce that foreshadows much of his later, more mature work. Set at small Logos College in West Texas, End Zone is narrated in first person by Gary Harkness, a blocking back on the football team during the school's first integrated year.

Plot summary

[edit]
Cover of the UK first edition.

The novel is divided into three sections. In the first, Gary Harkness, the narrator, meets Taft Robinson, Logos College's first Black football player as well as Major Staley, the teacher of his modern warfare class. This class sparks Gary's developing obsession with nuclear warfare. Gary begins dating Myna Corbett and an assistant coach commits suicide just as the crowning game of the season approaches.

The second section is solely a play-by-play retelling of the Big Game itself, where the main thematic content of the novel exists. DeLillo's disconnected, detached prose focuses the text on certain isolated images and dialogue throughout the game.

The third section surrounds the aftermath of the game as well as the impact of the plane-crash death of Logos College's founder. Gary, filled with ennui after these events, plays a complex war game with Major Staley; the novel's metaphor of football as warfare is challenged in the line "warfare is warfare." Taft Robinson admits that he has a morbid interest in the Holocaust which mirror's Gary's obsession. The novel ends with Gary being hospitalized for a mental breakdown, his future uncertain.

Reception

[edit]

A reviewer for Kirkus Reviews argued that DeLillo "seems to have at his natural command a kind of articulate mobility one cannot help but admire. [...] It's hard to take a body count of all those ideas which freefall off every page but then 'the thing to do is to walk in circles.' And occasionally pause. . . ."[2] In The New York Times Book Review, Thomas R. Edwards deemed End Zone an improvement over Americana and said that the writing "is continuously energetic, shifty, fun to watch for its own sake.” Edwards also argued that "[Gary's] fever, casually introduced in the final paragraph, hints at the uncertain but possible value of vulnerability, persisting without certitude in a world where others accept defensive systems —technologies, religion, games, the large or small cultisms that flourish where fear is.”[3]

Anya Taylor at The City University of New York argued the book would endure, especially praising Gary's desert meditation on the end zone. Taylor discussed how the novel dramatizes certain limitations of language and negative social phenomena involving language (such as the covering of unpleasant truths through euphemisms, or the prevention of meaningful interaction through over-reliance on simplistic maxims), and interpreted the novel as "a book about the decline of language under the bombardment of terms from thermonuclear warfare, and an attempt to revive language through an ascetic disciplined ritual of silence and self-loss".[4] Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times stated that End Zone confirmed DeLillo as one of the best young writers of his time, writing that the author was skilled at building scenes for comedic effect and praising the football game that is considered the novel's centerpiece as well as the pick-up game in the snow.[5]

Bill Beckett of The Harvard Crimson was less positive. While writing that End Zone has perhaps the best extended account of a football game ever written, and that the novel shows the author's "golden ear for the tin and tinsel of Americanese", Beckett also argued that "even isolated good satire can't hold together a disappointingly anticlimactic novel. DeLillo's buildup of suspense finally dissipates totally; many ominous hints are lost or forgotten by the end. [...] A season in the chaotic life of Gary Harkness, interesting as he is, does not suffice to make a satisfying whole."[6]

Chad Harbach lauded End Zone in 2004 as "a wonderful and underrated novel".[7] Daniel Roberts highly praised the novel in a 2018 retrospective for The Paris Review, where he wrote, "No novel nails the omnipresent violence of football better than End Zone".[8] In 2007, however, the novel was listed by New York as one of the DeLillo's works that is "for fans only": "There’s little plot to speak of in this second novel, just a series of hilarious riffs on the parallels between football and nuclear war. That’s not the most original comparison to draw, and the ending—or rather, the lack of one—makes it an ultimately unsatisfying read."[9] In 2011, Martin Amis listed End Zone among his favorite novels in DeLillo’s output.[10] Jeff Somers conversely ranked it 10th out of 17 of the author’s books, arguing that it was extremely funny but also that "there’s not much of a story here, and after meandering about for a while, it sort of just stops dead in its tracks."[11]

References

[edit]
Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

End Zone

View on Grokipedia
from Grokipedia
is the second by American author , originally published in 1972 by Houghton Mifflin Company. The book is narrated by Gary Harkness, a halfback on the football team at the fictional Logos College, a small institution in . Harkness, who has transferred from multiple previous colleges, develops an intense fascination with the terminology and simulations of nuclear war, paralleling the physicality and strategy of American football. The novel employs a satirical lens to juxtapose the jargon of gridiron sports with apocalyptic themes, critiquing Cold War anxieties and aspects of American masculinity and intellectual detachment. Set against the backdrop of a struggling Division III team's season, it explores Harkness's personal turmoil, including family estrangement and existential obsessions, culminating in a game that evokes broader metaphors of destruction and renewal. Often described as a darkly comedic farce, End Zone anticipates DeLillo's recurring motifs of media saturation, technological peril, and simulated realities in subsequent works like White Noise.

Publication and Context

Writing and Development

End Zone marked Don DeLillo's second novel, composed rapidly after the 1971 publication of his debut, Americana, during a prolific early career phase in which he produced five novels over seven years. In a 1996 interview, DeLillo characterized the writing of End Zone as "easier and looser" than his prior work, emphasizing an approach driven closer to his instincts, with greater attention to pacing, structural balances, and intuitive flow rather than rigid construction. The novel was published in 1972 by Houghton Mifflin, reflecting DeLillo's shift toward incorporating sports as a narrative framework, drawn from his upbringing where he actively played football alongside —experiences that informed the book's detailed depictions of the game without intending explicit analogies to . DeLillo's compositional method at this stage involved extensive to expand initial ideas into developed narratives, a he maintained throughout his to build layers of detail and motif. He adhered to a disciplined routine, writing for four hours each morning on a manual typewriter in solitude, followed by physical exercise and additional afternoon sessions, which supported the swift execution of End Zone amid his transition from advertising work to full-time authorship in New York. This period's output contrasted with the four-to-five years labored over Americana, signaling DeLillo's growing confidence in blending personal obsessions—like language breakdown and apocalyptic undercurrents—with elements such as campus and sports fiction.

Initial Publication and Editions

was first published in hardcover by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1972, marking Don DeLillo's second . The first edition consists of 242 pages, with the first printing indicated on the copyright page without mention of subsequent printings, and features a designed by Paul Bacon. In the , the initial edition appeared the same year from André Deutsch Limited. Subsequent editions include a release by in 1973, a edition in 1986 with 242 pages, and a reprint in 2011. These later versions maintained the original text without significant revisions reported.

Plot Summary

Narrative Overview

End Zone is narrated in the first person by Gary Harkness, a talented but restless halfback who enrolls at the small, fictional Logos College in remote after attending and leaving several other institutions. There, Harkness pursues his dual fixations: excelling in under Coach Emmett Creed and immersing himself in studies of by auditing Major Marv Staley's class on modern . The novel unfolds during Harkness's freshman year, blending the rigors of football practice—depicted with brutal intensity, where players are encouraged to inflict harm akin to combat—with Harkness's morbid fascination with apocalyptic scenarios, including detailed enumerations of atomic bomb yields and potential casualties. The football storyline gains momentum with the arrival of Taft Robinson, a skilled Black running back transferring from , marking the first such player on Logos's team and elevating their prospects against rivals like West Centrex Biotechnical Institute. The narrative builds to the "Big Game" against , recounted in exhaustive, play-by-play detail that mirrors battlefield dispatches, highlighting the physical and psychological toll on players. Interwoven are episodes of team dynamics, including the suicide of assistant coach Tom Cook Clark, and Harkness's interactions with eccentric teammates and staff, such as ROTC commander Major Staley, who embodies detached strategic thinking on global annihilation. Harkness's personal life involves fleeting relationships, notably with Corbett, a wealthy young woman intrigued by and physical imperfection, and friendships marked by philosophical , such as picnics debating with characters like and Vera . The plot escalates amid broader disruptions: the death of Logos College president Mrs. Tom Wade in a plane crash, Taft's abrupt departure from football to study literature, and Harkness's deepening depression, culminating in physical collapse and hospitalization. The narrative closes on an ambiguous note, with Harkness reflecting on the intersections of , failure, and existential dread in the shadow of potential , leaving his trajectory unresolved.

Characters

Gary Harkness and Supporting Figures

Gary Harkness serves as the and first-person narrator of End Zone, a talented halfback on the College football team in remote , whose athletic skills are undermined by a deepening marked by and an obsession with nuclear annihilation. In his early twenties, Harkness exhibits profound spiritual , viewing the world as futile, a perspective exacerbated by his history of or being expelled from multiple prior colleges due to academic and behavioral issues. He resists his father's rigid character-building , such as the mantra to "fight your way through," opting instead for a self-described laziness that manifests in aimless wandering, desert walks, and detachment from team dynamics. Among Harkness's closest teammates are Taft Robinson, the first student at Logos College and a fellow outsider from the Northeast, with whom Harkness forms a bond through shared intellectual isolation amid the team's physicality; and Anatole Bloomberg, a Jewish player who similarly hails from the Northeast and engages in Harkness's metaphysical discussions, highlighting themes of alienation in a predominantly rural, conservative environment. These relationships contrast with the broader team's jargon-heavy camaraderie, as Harkness gravitates toward figures who mirror his introspective detachment rather than the coach's militaristic drills. Emmett Creed, the head coach, embodies authoritarian discipline, enforcing grueling practices that blend football strategy with survivalist rhetoric, yet fails to instill purpose in Harkness, who perceives the regimen as futile amid his apocalyptic preoccupations. Myrna Corbett, Harkness's romantic interest, echoes his nihilistic worldview while subverting conventional by embracing an unadorned, anti-socialite aesthetic; their interactions, including picnics with the sisters and Vera, underscore mutual rejection of societal norms but devolve into strained intimacy amid personal breakdowns. Other peripheral figures, such as teammate Norgene Azamanian, whose fatal auto accident amplifies the novel's undercurrent of mortality, reinforce Harkness's orbit of transient connections in an isolated college setting.

Themes and Motifs

American Football as Metaphor

In Don DeLillo's End Zone (1972), serves as a for the ritualized and strategic abstraction inherent in , particularly the Cold War-era of nuclear escalation. The novel's , Gary Harkness, a at the fictional College in , immerses himself in the game's lexicon and tactics, which DeLillo renders through militaristic terminology—such as "ground acquisition" and "blitz"—that parallels battlefield maneuvers and evokes the era's military-industrial mindset. This equivalence underscores football's function as a contained of destruction, where players endure physical brutality under the guise of sport, mirroring how nations engage in proxy conflicts to avert total annihilation. DeLillo extends the metaphor by juxtaposing football's hyper-rationalized playbooks and statistics—Harkness obsessively memorizes formations and historical scores—with the impersonal underpinning , highlighting the absurdity of reducing human life to quantifiable risks. Critics have noted that the team's grueling practices and the coach's authoritarian commands reflect a fascist undertone in organized violence, yet DeLillo avoids simplistic equivalence, affirming football's visceral appeal as a to war's horror; as one character states, rejecting the "football as warfare" trope outright. The season's , a lopsided marred by injuries and exhaustion, culminates in a perverse "end zone" achievement that symbolizes pyrrhic triumph, akin to mutually assured destruction. This metaphorical layering critiques American cultural obsessions with dominance and spectacle, set against the 1970s Texas football fervor—where teams like the dominated nationally—transforming the gridiron into a microcosm of societal endgames. Scholarly analyses emphasize how DeLillo deconstructs through the sport's jargon-heavy discourse, revealing language's failure to contain existential threats, though some contend the maintains a deliberate separation between athletic and apocalyptic to preserve football's autonomous allure. Ultimately, the exposes the thrill and terror of controlled chaos, with Harkness's personal crises— and detachment—echoing players' masochistic discipline as a hedge against broader annihilation.

Nuclear Obsession and Apocalypse

In Don DeLillo's End Zone, protagonist Gary Harkness develops an intense fixation on nuclear holocaust amid his participation in college football, deriving a peculiar aesthetic pleasure from the specialized lexicon of atomic destruction, such as terms like "thermal hurricane," "overkill," and "circular error probability." This obsession originates from Harkness auditing a university course on warfare taught by Major Staley, a former military strategist, which exposes him to detailed scenarios of thermonuclear exchange and post-attack environments. Harkness's contemplations often occur during solitary walks in the barren West Texas desert surrounding Logos College, where the landscape's stark emptiness mirrors the void of annihilation he envisions. The novel intertwines this nuclear preoccupation with football through abstracted strategic jargon that parallels tactics and escalation doctrines, as seen in Harkness's discussions with Staley, who frames nuclear conflict in game-theoretic terms akin to Herman Kahn's escalation models. A pivotal scene depicts Harkness and Staley simulating a nuclear war in a remote , reducing global catastrophe to a controlled exercise that desensitizes participants to its horrors while evoking an ascetic yearning for terminal purity and closure. DeLillo critiques this dynamic as rooted in cultural and religious impulses toward , where the appeal of stems not merely from fears—prevalent in the early 1970s amid U.S.-Soviet tensions and events like the 1962 —but from a deeper, masochistic deflection of vital instincts into fantasies of violent cleansing. Harkness's fixation culminates in a personal enactment of apocalyptic deprivation: a simulating nuclear-induced , during which he enumerates words evoking —"," "," "starve"—to immerse himself in the sensory edge of collapse. This act underscores DeLillo's portrayal of nuclear obsession as an ironic perversion of ascetic discipline, akin to the football team's regimen of bodily denial, ultimately revealing the motif's : while evoking genuine dread of mutually assured destruction, it also exposes how such fantasies can gamify existential threats, rendering them perversely manageable or even desirable. The unresolved ending resists tidy resolution, emphasizing the ongoing psychological toll of living under the shadow of potential without resolution.

Language, Jargon, and Communication Breakdown

In End Zone, deploys football as a pervasive , embedding terms like "pony-out," "opp-flux draw," "Q-route," "monsoon sweep," and cryptic play calls such as "Spider 2 Y Banana" into descriptions of games and practices. This , often rendered in play-by-play sequences, imposes order on the chaos of physical confrontation while revealing its tautological and insular nature, where communication devolves into "elegant " accessible primarily to initiates. Players' reliance on signals, snap numbers, and color codes underscores how such codifies —evident in locker-room chants like "Cree-unch" that mimic the "swarm and thud of interchangeable bodies"—yet obscures individual agency and deeper interpersonal exchange. Nuclear and intersects with football argot, amplifying themes of abstracted destruction; Gary Harkness recites phrases like "thermal hurricane," "overkill," "circular error probability," and "post-attack environment" during his self-imposed study of "modes of ," equating gridiron brutality with apocalyptic scale. These terms, while precise, function as "painkillers" that numb the incomprehensible of , as Harkness critiques their failure to encapsulate phenomena like the death of millions, which remain "untellable." here "escapes its meaning," per Harkness's observation, fostering detachment through ritualistic repetition rather than genuine conveyance, as seen in Major Staley's detached vision of "humane warfare" regulated like a refereed . Communication breakdowns manifest in characters' reversion to monologic or jargon-bound speech, signaling broader existential isolation; Harkness's compulsive rewording of the world stems from a suspicion that hinges on 's mutability, yet yields only futile "language games" where words lose purpose. Football's structured verbiage provides temporary stability for Harkness, mirroring his quest for a wordless mind amid the nuclear sublime, but ultimately reinforces limits akin to Wittgenstein's notion of the unsayable, where and evade articulation. DeLillo thus portrays specialized jargons as both enabling illusions of control and precipitating relational fractures, critiquing a culture where empirical horrors are filtered through inadequate verbal constructs.

Reception and Criticism

Contemporary Reviews

End Zone received generally positive contemporary reviews upon its 1972 publication, with critics commending Don DeLillo's stylistic inventiveness, satirical edge, and the novel's fusion of with themes of nuclear apocalypse and linguistic fragmentation. Reviewers frequently highlighted the energetic and the metaphorical parallels between gridiron violence and thermonuclear strategy, though some noted structural inconsistencies or an overly schematic approach. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, in The New York Times on April 9, 1972, lauded the book as "a beautifully made football novel about thermonuclear ," emphasizing its "continuously energetic, shifty" writing that was "fun to watch for its own sake" and marking DeLillo's evolution from his debut Americana into a more original voice on contemporary absurdities. Thomas R. Edwards, reviewing for the on the same date, praised the 's parodies of jargon-laden discourse linking football to warfare, viewing it as a sharp commentary on isolation amid escalating tensions. In the New York Review of Books on June 29, 1972, Roger Sale interpreted End Zone as a targeting the emptiness of specialized languages—from sports plays to annihilation protocols—while exploring characters' detachment and latent aggression in a remote setting. S.K. Oberbeck, writing in The Washington Post Book World on April 16, 1972, appreciated the thematic focus on power dynamics, blending football's ritualistic brutality with existential dread through humor that underscored cosmic preoccupations. A assessment from March 6, 1972, admired DeLillo's "articulate mobility," portraying the narrative as a vibrant, if fragmented, depiction of Gary Harkness's obsessions amid team life. Criticism appeared in outlets like Time magazine on April 17, 1972, which deemed the overpraised for its "schematic" vision that prioritized conceptual links over depth. in the Los Angeles Times Book Review on March 26, 1972, acknowledged DeLillo's verbal fluency but faulted the story for losing momentum and ending abruptly, akin to an unfinished dramatic sketch. The New Yorker on May 6, 1972, characterized it as a "humorous " of jargon and antics, raw in execution but evocative of atomic-age unease. Overall, these responses positioned End Zone as an early indicator of DeLillo's command of postmodern motifs, though not without reservations about its cohesion.

Later Scholarly Analysis

Scholars have interpreted End Zone as a of how specialized jargon, particularly from and , fragments human communication and fosters detachment from existential threats. In Mark Osteen's , the novel's characters, immersed in thermonuclear terminology, exhibit an ascetic impulse that romanticizes as a purifying force, shielding them from the raw horror of destruction by reducing it to abstract systems. This view posits that DeLillo exposes a cultural where linguistic precision in and sports simulates control over chaos, yet ultimately erodes meaningful . Osteen argues that Gary Harkness's fixation on lists parallels football playbooks, both serving as escapist rituals that invert reality into ritualized violence. Later readings emphasize football's role as a for militarized American society, with the gridiron embodying tactical warfare amid Cold War anxieties. Paul Giaimo contends that DeLillo uses the sport to dissect how institutional rituals in Logos College mirror national , where players' bodies become expendable in pursuit of hierarchical dominance, akin to nuclear . This interpretation highlights the novel's context, post-Vietnam and amid escalating U.S.-Soviet tensions, as DeLillo critiques football's jargon-laden plays—such as "draw right 28 z-option"—as euphemisms for destructive aggression, paralleling war-planning lingo. Giaimo notes that the team's collapse after defeat underscores the fragility of such systems when confronted with unscripted failure, reflecting broader societal illusions of invincibility. Analyses of breakdown in End Zone often draw on Wittgensteinian ideas of "language games," where DeLillo portrays as both enabling and imprisoning . In a 1990 essay, scholars observe that the proliferation of nuclear acronyms (e.g., MAD for mutually assured destruction) and football signals creates a "decline of language under ," prompting characters like the narrator to seek revival through ascetic practices such as and . This deconstructive lens, applied retrospectively, views the novel's College—named for foundational reason—as a site of ironic failure, where attempts to reclaim pure "" via discipline collapse into silence or madness, prefiguring DeLillo's later explorations of media-saturated disconnection. Such interpretations attribute to DeLillo a prescient warning against technocratic discourse's dehumanizing effects, evidenced by Gary's obsessive cataloging of atomic blasts, which blends encyclopedic detail with personal unraveling. More recent scholarship integrates End Zone into DeLillo's oeuvre as an early probe of under systemic pressures, contrasting realist epistemologies with postmodern fragmentation. The novel's portrayal of football as a "sport guided by " underscores how codified signals promise order but yield alienation, a theme echoed in later works like White Noise. Critics argue this reflects causal realities of institutional incentives: football's meritocracy masks violence, much as nuclear deterrence rationalizes annihilation risks, with empirical parallels in 1970s defense spending spikes and ' commercialization. These views prioritize DeLillo's ironic detachment over ideological overlays, affirming the text's enduring insight into how insulates against apocalypse's visceral truth.

Achievements and Shortcomings

End Zone has been lauded for its innovative fusion of with apocalyptic themes, establishing DeLillo as a distinctive voice in early in his career. Critics have praised the novel's hallucinatory , particularly its portrayal of at the fictional Logos College in as a microcosm of existential dread and ritualistic violence akin to . The work's linguistic experimentation, including repetitive tautologies and jargon-heavy passages that mimic both gridiron plays and end-times lexicon, effectively underscores themes of and the limits of in confronting catastrophe. Contemporary reviewers, such as Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in on March 22, 1972, hailed it as a "," commending DeLillo's ironic command of to satirize mid-20th-century American obsessions with violence and annihilation. Scholarly analyses highlight its prescience in linking sports ritual to broader cultural , influencing later examinations of , tradition, and linguistic insufficiency in representing trauma. Despite these strengths, End Zone exhibits shortcomings typical of DeLillo's early oeuvre, often categorized as tentative or experimental in ways that prioritize stylistic flair over narrative cohesion. Characters, including protagonist Gary Harkness, can appear underdeveloped and alienating, with their obsessions—football drills paralleling nuclear fallout lists—serving more as vehicles for thematic abstraction than fully realized psyches, leading some readers to disengage emotionally. The novel's heavy reliance on repetitive motifs and deconstructive wordplay, while intellectually rigorous, risks opacity, questioning whether verbal constructs adequately capture the "untellable" physicality of sports or war's visceral reality. Compared to DeLillo's later, more structurally assured works like White Noise, End Zone's farce occasionally veers into perilously thin humor, where the absurd collision of football and apocalypse strains plausibility without deeper causal resolution. This experimental unevenness reflects the risks of DeLillo's nascent style, which, though groundbreaking, sometimes sacrifices accessibility for esoteric linguistic maneuvers.

Legacy and Cultural Impact

Influence on DeLillo's Oeuvre

End Zone (1972) established several motifs that permeated DeLillo's subsequent novels, particularly the fusion of American sports rituals with existential and apocalyptic anxieties. The Gary Harkness's obsession with nuclear war strategies, analogized through football tactics, prefigured DeLillo's recurring portrayal of modern rituals as veiled confrontations with . This thematic linkage of physical contest to global catastrophe echoed in Underworld (1997), where baseball games intersect with nuclear waste and history, underscoring DeLillo's sustained interest in how cultural spectacles mask deeper societal dread. The novel's examination of specialized —encompassing football terminology and —as a barrier to authentic communication anticipated similar linguistic deconstructions in later works. In End Zone, characters wage "wars of jargon" that fragment perception and self-awareness, a dynamic DeLillo expanded in (1976) through esoteric scientific dialects. These elements contributed to DeLillo's oeuvre-wide critique of language's inadequacy in capturing reality, evident in The Names (1982), where verbal systems fail amid cultural decay. Structurally, End Zone's tripartite division with a protracted central section influenced the architecture of White Noise (1985), which similarly employs episodic builds toward crisis. The satire of disaster scenarios in End Zone, blending farce with nuclear peril, foreshadowed White Noise's "airborne toxic event" as a proxy for uncontrollable catastrophe, amplifying themes of death denial and media-mediated fear. Moreover, the motif of crowds and spectatorship introduced here evolved into Mao II (1991)'s meditations on mass mediation and isolation. Through these innovations, End Zone transitioned DeLillo from tentative early experimentation toward his mature synthesis of humor, genre pastiche, and causal inquiries into technological and institutional alienation.

Broader Literary and Cultural Resonance

End Zone exemplifies DeLillo's early engagement with postmodern techniques, blending the ritualistic violence of with apocalyptic nuclear dread to deconstruct cultural logos and expose the fragility of language in the face of existential threats. This fusion positions the novel within a subgenre of postmodern fiction that interrogates sport as surrogate warfare, influencing later works such as David Foster Wallace's , which alludes to End Zone to explore similar themes of , , and simulated destruction. Critics have highlighted its "polarfiction" quality—combining mass-cultural elements like gridiron jargon with extreme philosophical inquiries into mortality—as a hallmark that anticipates DeLillo's broader of media-saturated . In literary , the novel's lies in its satirical of ascetic impulses driving both athletic and end-times obsession, tracing cultural fixations on violent purification back to religious undercurrents in . Mark Osteen argues that DeLillo unmasks nuclear fascination as a secular echo of puritanical , a motif that reverberates through postmodern apocalyptic narratives beyond DeLillo's oeuvre. Its portrayal of football's repetitive drills as failed compulsions against has informed analyses of sport's inadequacy in mastering primal fears, extending to examinations of how from games and erodes meaningful . Culturally, End Zone captures mid-20th-century American militarization, using —set in the Vietnam era—as a microcosm for societal rituals that normalize destruction, a perspective that endures in discussions of as proxies for geopolitical tensions. Published in , it predates heightened nuclear anxieties of the but resonates with ongoing debates over football's concussive brutality mirroring impersonal warfare, as seen in contemporary reflections on the Super Bowl's scripted chaos amid global perils. The novel's setting amplifies its critique of regional intertwined with national obsessions, influencing views of American identity as one of performative aggression rather than mere pastime. This broader echo underscores DeLillo's role in framing literature not as escapist but as a lens for confronting collective self-destruction.

References

  1. http://perival.com/delillo/endzone_editions.html
  2. https://www.gradesaver.com/end-zone/study-guide/character-list
  3. https://www.supersummary.com/end-zone/summary/
  4. https://www.amazon.com/End-Zone-Don-DeLillo/dp/0140085688
  5. https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/don-delillo-end-zone-football-novel-legacy/
  6. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/end-zone-don-delillo
  7. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1887/the-art-of-fiction-no-135-don-delillo
  8. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1208140
  9. https://www.themodernnovel.org/americas/other-americas/usa/delillo/end/
  10. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/don-delillo-in-context/writing-and-writers/5EBE0DE4044CA3E709A7B88FCDE6560D
  11. https://manifold.sc.edu/read/understanding-don-delillo/section/dd4f6f1e-d126-4101-95d2-f2917572ebb4
  12. http://www.fedpo.com/BookDetail.php/End-Zone
  13. https://www.biblio.com/book/end-zone-delillo-don/d/1622991213
  14. https://www.goodreads.com/work/editions/2159-end-zone
  15. https://www.gradesaver.com/end-zone/study-guide/summary
  16. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/end-zone-analysis-major-characters
  17. https://www.enotes.com/topics/end-zone/characters
  18. https://postcardsfrompurgatory.com/2016/02/12/final-thoughts-on-delillos-end-zone-by-bethany/
  19. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43486797
  20. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/don-delillo-in-context/sports/64494582684ED9895B52703F248D170C
  21. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Game-Theory-Narrative-and-the-Myth-of-the-State-Belletto/0a14667e759e4a5c1c0f88a9266ba22bfca92d0a
  22. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED102583.pdf
  23. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26282533
  24. https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/29/28
  25. https://digital.la84.org/digital/api/collection/p17103coll10/id/7358/download
  26. https://markosteen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Osteen-Against-the-End.pdf
  27. https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2159-end-zone
  28. https://evanreads.substack.com/p/on-and-off-the-gridiron-with-don
  29. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/02/02/don-delillos-nuclear-football/
  30. https://skemman.is/bitstream/1946/11523/1/Lokaverkefni.pdf
  31. http://perival.com/delillo/endzone_media.html
  32. https://www.nytimes.com/1972/04/09/archives/end-zone-by-don-delillo-242-pp-boston-houghton-mifflin-co-595-end.html
  33. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/don-delillo/end-zone/
  34. https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/IFR/article/download/13222/14305
  35. https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/2135-mark-osteen-on-the-apocalyptic-satire-and-historical-panorama-of-don-delillo/
  36. https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article/41/1/117/164806/The-Self-Erasing-WordTautology-and-Unspeakability
  37. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Sport%2Bfiction%2Band%2Bthe%2Buntellable%253A%2BCliche%2Band%2BLanguage%2Bin%2BDon...-a0364957728
  38. https://academic.oup.com/book/7293/chapter/152020381
  39. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3149/jms.0801.73
  40. https://literariness.org/2018/05/29/analysis-of-don-delillos-novels/
  41. http://perival.com/delillo/ddlitcrit.html
  42. https://granta.com/city-of-dis-the-fiction-of-don-delillo/
  43. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/244299/summary
  44. https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/470/
  45. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/don-delillo-the-super-bowl-and-the-fragile-language-of-the-game
  46. https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2017/04/outside-baseball/
Add your contribution
Related Hubs
User Avatar
No comments yet.