End Zone by Don DeLillo

First published: 1972

Type of plot: Comic allegory

Time of work: About 1970

Locale: West Texas

Principal Characters:

• Gary Harkness, a halfback with metaphysical yearnings at Logos College in west Texas
• Taft Robinson, a running back who transfers from Columbia University; Logos College’s first black student
• Anatole Bloomberg, Gary’s roommate; a left tackle on offense and a bed wetter
• Myna Corbett, Gary’s sidekick and classmate in Mexican geography

The Novel

End Zone presents little plot but a lot of vivid characterization and zany but sparkling dialogue. What story there is follows Gary Harkness, the narrator, through the fall and winter of his first year at Logos College in west Texas. The president of the school is Mrs. Tom Wade, the founder’s widow. Mrs. Tom, as the players call her, dies in the crash of a light plane. The football coach at Logos is Emmett Creed, whose vision of life is clear: “It’s only a game,” he said, “but it’s the only game.”

The story opens with the news that Taft Robinson, a talented running back, is transferring to Logos from Columbia. He will be the school’s first black student. His recruitment is part of the strategy of the brilliant Coach Creed, and his presence on the squad is catalytic. Taft makes Logos a powerful team, with only one real challenge in its conference, West Centrex Biotechnical Institute. Most of part 1 is devoted to entertaining talk about football and preparation for the big contest with Centrex.

In the background of Gary’s love of football is his preoccupation with nuclear war and devastation. He becomes a regular auditor of Major Staley’s course in aspects of modern warfare, and he even drops by the major’s motel room to converse about warheads and casualty estimates. For Major Staley, the topic verges on metaphysics. He expounds to Gary at length: “There’s a kind of theology at work here. The bombs are a kind of god. As his power grows, our fear naturally increases.” Gary is absorbed in these talks. After one evening with the major, he thinks long, long thoughts as he hikes the two miles back to campus. “I thought of men embedded in the ground, all killed, billions, flesh cauterized with the earth, bits of bone and hair and nails, man-planet, a fresh intelligence revolving through the system.” Such meditations return to Gary repeatedly. They form a backdrop against which his thoughts cross his mind.

Off the football field, Gary’s best friend is Myna Corbett. Gary goes on picnics with Myna and two of her friends, the sisters Esther and Vera Chalk. Myna brings “meatless and breadless organic sandwiches” on these outings, and they all chatter brightly about such nontopics as the occult relationship between raw vegetables and the numeral seventeen.

Part 2 is devoted entirely to a play-by-play account of the crucial contest with Centrex. Don DeLillo tells the story extremely well. What might have been a mechanical set piece generates excitement and suspense, and it is completely convincing in its rich texture of football savvy. The cliches about football and war are rejected at the outset and replaced with the fresh view that “sport is a benign illusion, the illusion that order is possible.” A further claim is that it is “a form of society that is rat-free and without harm to the unborn. . . .”

Part 3 completes the symmetrical structure of End Zone, making it a triptych with a small middle panel depicting the game. After the high excitement of “the only game,” campus life provides Gary merely a severe letdown: “I stepped out of the bus under a strange silverwhite sky. It was awful to be back. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, to look forward to.” The bleakness of the scene is compounded by Mrs. Tom’s sudden death in an airplane crash, a loss that matches the meaninglessness of the suicide in part 1 of Tom Cook Clark, a much-admired assistant coach. Gary takes comfort only in Myna’s friendship and becomes more drawn into Major Staley’s scenarios of nuclear apocalypse. Taft Robinson decides to abandon football and sits in his room contemplating “static forms of beauty” and reading books on Adolf Hitler’s gas ovens and atrocities committed on children. End Zone concludes with Gary drinking “half a cup of lukewarm water,” succumbing to his spiritual despair, and undergoing hospitalization.

The Characters

Gary Harkness does a lot of thinking about himself and his teammates: “Some of us were more simple than others; a few might might be called outcasts or exiles; three or four, as on every football team, were crazy. But we were all—even myself—we were all dedicated.” Gary numbers himself among the exiles, often wondering what he is doing in the “summer tundra” of west Texas. He is in west Texas as a last resort, having dropped out of four previous universities. He was an all-state halfback at his New York high school, pushed to do his best by an eager father, and received twenty-eight scholarship offers.

Gary’s first school was Syracuse University, from which he was dismissed when he holed up in his room for two days “with two packages of Oreo cookies and a girl named Lippy Margolis.” At Penn State, everything went well until monotony set in and he quit attending practices, at which time he was given inspirational lectures on the need to sacrifice and on football as a microcosm of life. Nothing availing, Gary went home to the Adirondacks and toughed out the winter before enrolling at the University of Miami, where his new interest in nuclear catastrophe depressed him so badly that he went home again. In his next gridiron incarnation, at Michigan State University, he was doing fine until one day he and two teammates converged brutally on an Indiana safetyman. The safetyman died the next day, and Gary went home and sat in his room for seven weeks.

Given this history, only the brooding football genius, Emmett Creed, will take a chance on Gary. That is why Gary is at Logos. (Logos means reason or word, and of Tom Wade, the school’s founder, his widow explains, “He was a man of reason. He cherished the very word. Unfortunately, he was mute.”) This is a typical DeLillo touch.

Gary finds in Myna Corbett a sensibility to match his own spiritual torpor. Myna has half a million dollars. She weighs in at 165 pounds and suffers from blotches on her face. “She bit her nails, she waddled, she never shut up.” She refuses to lose weight and to see a dermatologist, claiming that her physical condition relieves her of the responsibility of being beautiful. She favors gold chains, Victorian shawls, and patchwork skirts. She makes Gary feel comfortable, and he is eloquent about her appeal: “She created a private balance of nature, a sense of things being right, or almost right, both in themselves and against a larger requirement.”

Among his teammates, Gary is closest to Taft Robinson and Anatole Bloomberg, a black and a Jew, both from the Northeast and both of whom share Gary’s outcast state and his habit of dwelling on unanswerable questions. Robinson is superbly talented, rooms alone, and wearies of his gift for football. Bloomberg, left tackle on offense, confides that he has come to Texas to “unjew” himself. To unjew himself, Anatole explains, a Jew must change his way of speaking. “You take out the urbanisms. The question marks. All that folk wisdom. The melodies in your speech.” Besides the “enormous nagging historical guilt” that Bloomberg finds in Jews as innocent victims, he is burdened by enuresis and three hundred pounds of flesh. He remarks that he has a tendency to expand in hot weather “like a bridge,” and because of his distaste for peeling skin, he remains pallid in west Texas. “Let’s just say that my awareness of reptilian antecedents is unnaturally vivid.”

DeLillo has a knack for creating quirky, implausible, likable victims of life, and those in End Zone are some of his best.

Critical Context

End Zone was DeLillo’s second novel, and it displays what have become DeLillo trademarks: an interest in character presentation over plot and of texture over structure. DeLillo is a careful chronicler of modern America, shaping his fabrications around a central character who struggles against the pressures of life in a fast-paced society. In a number of subsequent novels, including such highly praised works as Ratner’s Star (1976) and White Noise (1985), DeLillo has pursued the fascination with intellectual systems and specialized vocabularies that informs End Zone. While DeLillo’s distinctive approach to fiction—deliberately detached, analytic, though often bleakly amusing—has established him as an important voice in contemporary American literature, he has not won a wide readership, and End Zone remains his most accessible and most enjoyable novel.

Bibliography

Keesey, Douglas. Don DeLillo. New York: Twayne, 1993. A thorough introductory study of DeLillo, which covers DeLillo’s major works and includes a chapter devoted to End Zone.

LeClair, Tom. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. LeClair asserts that DeLillo should be acknowledged as one of America’s leading novelists. In this study, LeClair examines eight of DeLillo’s novels in detail from the perspective of systems theory.

Lentricchia, Frank, ed. Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. A collection of critical essays providing a solid overview of DeLillo’s art and the social and intellectual context of his writings.

Osteen, Mark. “Against the End: Asceticism and Apocalypse in Don DeLillo’s End Zone.” Papers on Language and Literature 26 (Winter, 1990): 143-164. Focuses on the concept of asceticism in End Zone and explores America’s fascination with nuclear annihilation. Osteen compares End Zone with DeLillo’s other novels.