End Zone is the second novel published by Don DeLillo and sets the stage for much of what would come to be viewed as standard conventions of the novel’s work. In other words, very much like Underworld and somewhat less like Libra, End Zone is a novel far less concerned with traditional perspectives on the importance of plot and far more interested in how character affects story. Perhaps because DeLillo was still in the early stages of establishing what would become his idiosyncratic signature, the focus on character in End Zone endows it with significantly more accessibility than the more robust and philosophically complex novels to come.
End Zone is the second novel published by Don DeLillo and sets the stage for much of what would come to be viewed as standard conventions of the novel’s work. In other words, very much like Underworld and somewhat less like Libra, End Zone is a novel far less concerned with traditional perspectives on the importance of plot and far more interested in how character affects story. Perhaps because DeLillo was still in the early stages of establishing what would become his idiosyncratic signature, the focus on character in End Zone endows it with significantly more accessibility than the more robust and philosophically complex novels to come. That said, End Zone fits quite comfortably into the impressive canon of DeLillo’s novels that place such focus upon a single character as a means of examining what it means to be alive the society transforming from the latter half of the 20th century into the early part of the 21st century. An excellent single-term description to place upon the novels making up DeLillo’s body of work might be “Pressure.” With End Zone and its unique perspective upon the sport which has defined American society over the time period that is the focus of DeLillo’s examination, the pressure that falls upon the main character extends far beyond what more traditional and less experimental novel taking the game of football as a metaphor attempt. The pressure faced by Gary Harkness is End Zone is limited to the street of playing the game in much the way that the pressure faced by the character at the center of Libra—Lee Harvey Oswald—is limited to his plans for the day of November 22, 1963.
Indeed, football becomes both the cause and the means of escape from the madness of the world. Where novels by other men drop characters facing similar circumstances as those faced by Gary Harkness into a world where madness is inextricably tied to structural organizations, End Zone becomes DeLillo’s first major foray into presenting a world where the inextricability of the madness of the modern world involves everyone and no one gets the free pass of outsider wisdom uncorrupted in its purity of vision. The gridiron of End Zone is a cuckoo’s nest as seen from bleachers so high that McMurphy and Nurse Ratched appear to be playing on the same team at times and on opposite sides of the ball at others.
Football is—to a much less extent that baseball, of course—about order, structure and organization. Football—to a much greater extent than baseball, of course—is also overrun with metaphors for war, battle, aggression and the power of teamwork. More often than those who love the game would like to admit, those metaphors come into conflict with each other and create a disconnect into which the thinking person might allow in some anxiety. Which, of course, is precisely why so much of the practices involved in organized football are dedicated to fusing an irrevocable alliance between teamwork and warlike aggression and it is within those philosophical air pockets that so much of the philosophical humor at work in End Zone breathes so desperately.
