From Amazon.com
Don DeLillo's second novel, a sort of
Dr. Strangelove meets
North Dallas Forty, solidified his place in the American literary landscape in the early 1970s. The story of an angst-ridden, war-obsessed running back for Logos College in West Texas,
End Zone is a heady and hilarious conflation of Cold War existentialism and the parodied parallelism of battlefield/sports rhetoric. When not arguing nuclear endgame strategy with his professor, Major Staley, narrator Gary Harkness joins a brilliant and unlikely bunch of overmuscled gladiators on the field and in the dormitory. In characteristic fashion, DeLillo deliberately undermines the football-is-combat cliché by having one of his characters explain: "I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing." What remains is an insightful examination of language in an alien, postmodern world, where a football player's ultimate triumph is his need to play the game.
Product Description
In West Texas, college men play football with intense passion. During a winning season the running back, Gary Harkness, is fuelled by fear of, and fascination with, nuclear conflict. Among players the terminologies of football and nuclear war - the language of end zones - become interchanged.
