Although Endzone is a first-person narrative, there is a curious impersonality about it, as though the narrator, Gary Harkness, is able to divorce himself from his own thoughts and present an "objective" view of the institutions, persons, and events he experiences. In this sense, the novel is more like a "research paper" than a cartoon — a product of one of those students who is always asking if it is all right to "put in my own opinion." The gap between Gary's own feelings, so far as readers know them, and his portrayal of the world around him is almost a paradigm of "alienation." The comic effects, however, come only as a result of this alienation. Readers rarely feel that Gary is ridiculing his teammates or friends; it is the very impersonality of his narrative voice that makes the incongruity of the behavior he describes so amusing. Gary...