Let’s start at the beginning:

“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eyes that’s halfway hopeful.”

A really quite stunning section ensues and is closes before the first white space blank:

“Then you lose him in the crowd.”

The first time I read this, I assumed, that this was the voice of an narrator speaking to the reader. This reading is most consistent with the use of the second person direct address in fiction. But now it struck me as the author speaking to himself, as if jotting a note during a character sketch. I think this reading holds some weight given all DeLillo does in the Prologue. The concerns of language and how to frame the story in language are present in the story itself. The Russians don’t explode the bomb with ‘boldness’ or ‘bravado’, they do so “in plain unpretending language.”

Novels are often spoken of as "worlds" (i.e. the world that an author creates in a given novel). DeLillo does not create a world in his books so much as he creates a language in which things happen. In doing so, he becomes susceptible to the oft-repeated criticism that his fiction (dialogue especially) are not realistic – this will come up in my post on the next section probably. The author is aware, and alerts the reader to the fact that things always happen in language first.

The second person ‘you’ is only (I’m pretty sure) brought back at the very end of the novel (no peeking!). The effect is one of book ending the novel (somehow that isn’t a tautology) with a self-conscious author in the process of writing the book itself. In my own writing and thought I have a similar compulsion to call the language into question before using it, and often I never get beyond the questioning phase. I could talk about this in regard to experimental poetry forever but I won’t.

One using Lacan could say the book doesn’t assume some sort of alternate reality in which disbelief must be suspended, but rather consciously assumes the symbolic realm of language and moves out from there.

Here are some notes:

“Nobody has a vocabulary for what happened this year”

“The field seems to open outward into nouns and verbs”

The announcer, Russ used to fabricate games on the radio and fill in the details from only a statistics sheet.

And of course, bits of paper reigning down on Pafko in the outfield.


Rereading the book and gauging my response to it has reminded me how much I have changed or grown as a reader in the last couple years. When I first read the book, which was really at the time of my introduction to formal literary analysis, I was very much reading for themes, for what things mean. As a less mature reader at the time I found that the only way to approach such a large and intelligent novel was to try to figure out everything, uncover all meanings and symbols. On this read those concerns were hardly present and I find that I get so much more out of a brief passage than I do from grappling with the larger ideas of the book. I now care much more about prose than plot. The preoccupations with the minute, and the specific, and the sentence level are probably not shared by those for whom reading novels and academics were/are separate endeavors.