Analyzing the Threads of Loss and Baseball in Don DeLillo's Underworld

"Baseball is not simply an essential of this country, it is a living memory of what the American culture at its best works to be.... Its wisdom says you can go home again, but that you cannot stay. The journey must always start once more... until there is an end to all journeying." -A. Bartlett

Giamatti

Baseball, it is said, is a game of inches. Inches be fair, foul, strike, ball, safe, out. Life, too, is about inches, moments between life, death, friend, foe, right, wrong. In Don DeLillo's Underworld DeLillo's fictionalized (though historically accurate) account of the momentous 1951 final pennant play-off game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants serves as a link between past and present throughout the novel. In an interview with ESPN in 2001, Orioles shortstop Cal Ripken spoke of his own achievement, breaking Lou Gehrig's consecutive game record, by saying, "It offered a link back to another era, where people thought it was a game, it was simple, it was pure" (Ripken Interview). DeLillo using the 1951 game as a starting point for his novel offers that same link, a link that Nick both reaches for and shuns throughout "the narrative that lives in the spaces of the official play-by-play" (DeLillo 27).