Endzone Summary
Don Delillo

Endzone Summary

Endzone is about the ways in which various ideas of order function either to protect and enhance human life or, conversely, to protect and reinforce the collective impulses toward destruction and dissolution. The traditional linkage between the "character-building" quality of sports (the "playing fields of Eton" syndrome) and reinforcement of masculine power through military strategy and discipline (the military "will make a man" of him) is examined mercilessly in this disturbingly comic novel. While the novel is rich in subordinate themes — the role of athletics in higher education, the obsession with physical beauty in male-female relationships, the impact of both holocausts (Nazi and nuclear) on contemporary thought — the focus consistently returns to the context of the practice and the game, and the efforts of the players to make sense of what they are doing, as well as to comprehend the significance of...

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