Endzone | Literary Precedents

Endzone Literary Precedents

While the athletic and military elements in Endzone might seem to focus its satire, the larger issues place it in a line of political and epistemological speculation stretching from Petronius through Swift, Voltaire, and Sterne to Nabokov and Kundera. Efforts to link DeLillo with Pynchon, Barth, and Gaddis are reasonable, but tend to obscure his unique perspective on the "current topic of interest" — a topic he invariably dissolves and absolves of importance in his vat of irony. (Indeed, he seems to have an uncanny ability to predict the coming "topic," whether it be drug abuse, terrorism, or environmental pollution. But then, the topics are never the important parts of his fictions.)