title: End Zone
author:  Don DeLillo 
description: Don DeLillo's second novel, a sort of <I><A HREF="/exec/obidos/ISBN=6302799066/${0}">Dr. Strangelove</A></I> meets <I><A HREF="/exec/obidos/ISBN=6300216659/${0}">North Dallas Forty</A></I>, solidified his place in the American literary landscape in the early 1970s. The story of an angst-ridden, war-obsessed running back for Logos College in West Texas, <I>End Zone</I> is a heady and hilarious conflation of Cold War existentialism and the parodied parallelism of battlefield/sports rhetoric. When not arguing nuclear endgame strategy with his professor, Major Staley, narrator Gary Harkness joins a brilliant and unlikely bunch of overmuscled gladiators on the field and in the dormitory. In characteristic fashion, DeLillo deliberately undermines the football-is-combat clich&eacute; by having one of his characters explain: &quot;I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing.&quot; What remains is an insightful examination of language in an alien, postmodern world, where a football player's ultimate triumph is his need to play the game.
zlib_text: 
  
  
  Don DeLillo
  
  
  End Zone
  
  
  
  
  
  [Part One](_Toc51172591)
  
  
  [1](_Toc51172592)
  
  
  [2](_Toc51172593)
  
  
  [3](_Toc51172594)
  
  
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  [18](_Toc51172609)
  
  
  [Part Two](_Toc51172610)
  
  
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  [Part Three](_Toc51172612)
  
  
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  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Part One
  
  
  
  
  
  ### 1
  
  
  TAFT ROBINSON WAS the first black student to be enrolled at Logos College in
  west Texas. They got him for his speed.
  
  
  By the end of that first season he was easily one of the best running backs in
  the history of t