1 - A Tender Experience: Aesthetics of Death in DeLillo’s Fiction

Summary

‘We were basically stateless.’

Don DeLillo, ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’

I

There is a children's game, played by the members of the college football team in Don DeLillo's 1972 novel End Zone, that prefigures his thinking about the relation between death and fiction as it develops over the course of his writing. The game takes place over six or seven days, on the silent, empty campus of the remote college in West Texas where the protagonist, Gary Harkness, is a student on a football scholarship. It's ‘extremely simple-minded’, Harkness says. ‘Almost every child has played it in one form or another.’ The game is called ‘Bang You’re Dead’:

Your hand assumes the shape of a gun and you fire at anyone who passes. You try to reproduce, in your own way, the sound of a gun being fired. Or you simply shout these words: Bang, you’re dead. The other person clutches a vital area of his body and then falls, simulating death. (End Zone 31–2)

At first, Harkness says, the game seemed silly and childish, ‘even for a bunch of bored and lonely athletes’; but as the game stretches on, over the long, empty days, he begins to understand that ‘beneath its bluntness’ it was ‘compellingly intricate’: ‘It possessed gradations, dark joys, a resonance echoing from the most perplexing of dreams’ (32). As a killer, Harkness derives a rich cinematic pleasure from the game. ‘I shot Terry Madden at sunset from a distance of forty yards’, he says. ‘He held his stomach and fell, in slow motion, and then rolled down the grassy slope, tumbling, rolling slowly as possible, closer, slower, ever nearer, tumbling down to die at my feet with the pale setting of the sun’ (32). But it is in dying rather than killing that Harkness experiences the more intense joy. ‘I died well’, he says, ‘and for this reason was killed quite often’:

One afternoon, shot from behind, I staggered to the steps of the library and remained there, on my back, between the second and the third step at the approximate middle of the stairway.