61 pages • 2 hours read
Don DeLilloUnderworld
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Social Alienation
Social alienation is a recurring theme in Underworld, to the point where many of the characters feel completely detached from the world around them. To them, society seems like a series of people performing the roles expected of them, rather than actually living their lives in a meaningful way. Nick is one such alienated individual. To all intents and purposes, he has succeeded in life. He has escaped the relative poverty of his youth, the tragedy of his father’s abandonment, and the trauma of his incarceration to find himself a well-paid executive with a young family and enough disposable income to make impulse purchases such as the Bobby Thomson baseball. Nick has defied the odds to achieve happiness and financial security, but he is not happy. He works in waste, and even his recycling system has an air of performance about it. He engages with the ritual of it, while at the same time knowing that the fate of most recycled materials is to end up in a landfill. Nick ambles through life, craving the excitement of his youth. Even his purchase of the baseball is his attempt to reengage with something that once meant something to him. Nevertheless, the baseball makes him feel hollow and reminds him of his alienation. Nick feels nothing but comes to accept this social alienation as a broader social issue.
Marian finds herself in a similar position. She is married to Nick, and she revives her career after both her children graduate college. Marian, like her husband, has done everything society expected of her. However, she does not feel satisfied. She has nothing meaningful in her life. She attempts to fill the void of social alienation with sex and drugs. She embarks on an affair with Brian that is marked by her constant desire for emotional intensity. She hopes that intensifying the emotion of the affair will somehow make it more meaningful. Even her use of heroin is different from that of a genuine addict like George the Waiter. She smokes heroin after sex, almost as a way of goading Brian into either stopping her or joining her. Either way, she is complicating the situation as a way to add some sort of drama or intensity to a dull and unengaged existence. Eventually, the affair ends and Marian and Nick settle into a pattern of relative contentment. They accept their social alienation because society offers them nothing else.
As a weapon designer, Matt is forced to confront his role in supporting a military-industrial complex from which he is alienated. His brief attempts to defend his job against a protester end in shame and embarrassment. On a camping trip, he tries to prompt Janet to convince him to give up his job. She appreciates the feeling of safety that he brings to her life, however, so she will not tell him. Matt struggles to identify his alienation but eventually realizes that he must take control of his life. He leaves his position and moves into the private sector. However, he does not find the satisfaction he seeks. His life still lacks meaning and direction, so he satisfies his desire to understand the world by rewatching videos of the Texas Highway Killer; his search for buried information in the background of the images echoes his work with satellite imagery in Vietnam. This time, however, Matt does not feel responsible for the killer’s violence. He is still searching in vain for meaning, but he has at least found a way to assuage his responsibility.
Dietrologia
Dietrologia, Nick explains to Big Sims, is an Italian word for “the science of what is behind something” (280). He uses this term to explain the fascination with a cargo ship that is moving from port to port for an undefined reason. Like many people, Nick and Big Sims have their own explanations for what is happening. These explanations vary from professional insight to conspiracy theories, but the true explanation for the ship’s movements remains mysterious and unknowable. The unknowability of the world is a key theme in Underworld. The world of the novel is awash with secrets, real and imagined conspiracies, repressed truths, and deliberate acts of misdirection. The characters are desperate to know what the world is really like, but they are constantly reminded of how little they actually know, as in the case of the cargo ship. Rather than accept this unknowability, however, characters become obsessed with rooting out the hidden “truth.” Hoover is a key exponent of this, reshaping American society in the image of his own paranoia and conflating secrets, rumors, and gossip with truth once they enter his manila folders. Matt’s colleague Eric is a similar figure, someone who works in science and has the clearance to view classified documents. Eric prefers the thrill of conspiracies, however, finding in them a hidden truth he doesn’t believe he can find in official documents. Conspiracy theories allow him to avoid facing the true unknowability of the world while giving him the illusion of confronting and mastering it. Conspiracy theories extend to private life as well, as when Matt and Nick discuss their father’s fate. Entertaining theories about his disappearance becomes a popular way to pass the time, far preferable to confronting the brutal truth that they will never know what actually happened.
Many things are hidden from public view in Underworld, including sickness. Characters hide their health problems out of a desire for privacy or a sense that no one really cares if they are sick. Marvin eventually confesses to Nick that he has a “mushroom-shaped tumor” (192), a motivation that would have remained hidden from the world if he did not decide in this case to share it. Other private health matters include the various lumps that are found and removed and Sister Edgar’s belief that Ismael has AIDS. These hidden health matters are referenced in passing but never resolved, part of the wider unknowability of private life that makes a total, objective understanding of the universe impossible. As much as the characters want to understand the world they inhabit, their desire to keep certain information secret—either for health or privacy reasons—illustrates why that desire can never truly be achieved.
The reality is that hidden worlds do exist in Underworld. This idea is perhaps best represented by the Wall and its inhabitants. Ismael and his crew are forced to the periphery of a society that has offered them no help. Ismael is totally removed from the wealthy world of characters like Klara and Nick. Even when Klara goes in search of Ismael, she only finds burned-out buildings and traces of his work. They are from separate worlds, so much so that they can barely interact. The children of the Wall live in a hidden world that is created by rampant capitalism. In the Epilogue, titled “Das Kapital,” the people of the Wall commemorate the death of a young girl named Esmeralda. Her brutal death occasions one of the few times that their world enters mainstream society. However, almost immediately, she is turned into media to be consumed, which dehumanizes her and allows mainstream society to “look the other way” even as they shine a spotlight on her. The Wall is a hidden world, but one that is hidden in plain sight: Mainstream society simply refuses to see it, much as they refuse to see the garbage their wealth generates.
Consumerism and Identity
Throughout Underworld, characters seek to create identity through their consumer choices. Given their lack of agency in society and their struggle to create anything artistically meaningful, the characters rely on commodities to say something about their personality. Erica Deming, for example, develops a reputation for being a genius with Jell-O. She needs the product to give her life a meaning and purpose that is unique to her. Many of the brands and commercials that feature in the novel promise a similar sense of satisfaction. By purchasing this car or this microwave oven, the commercials suggest, the characters will be able to create an identity for themselves. But the consumer identities offered by these products are hollow. The game between the Dodgers and the Giants that opens the novel illustrates the vapidity of brand identity. During the 1951 game, the Dodgers and the Giants are both based in New York City, the same city as their fans. By the time Nick gets to actually see the two teams play, however, they have both relocated to California. The teams’ identities remain the same. They are still the Giants and the Dodgers. Their attachment to their actual community has been ripped away, however, turning them into a capitalized, commodified husk of what they once were.
Nick’s relationship with baseball illustrates the perils of consumerism. After the Dodgers move to California, Nick has no team. He used to identify as a Dodgers fan, but that time has passed, so he searches for another identity, eventually dropping out of school and discovering crime and women. As an adult, after enduring many traumatic events, Nick seeks to reconnect with his past. Since he lacks the capacity to actually engage with his past—his wife talks more to his mother than he does, he rarely talks to his brother, and he does not talk to people from his old neighborhood—he turns to buying goods to express his nostalgic desire. Nick buys the ball that supposedly was involved in his team’s most humiliating defeat. He remembers listening to the game on his roof, he remembers the emotion that it stirred in him, and he tries to reproduce that emotional experience and reconnect with his former identity by buying the baseball. The baseball does not work. Nick is too skeptical, too jaded by modern society to reconnect with what he has left behind. The baseball is lost among his many other possessions, becoming just another part of the consumerist noise that masks his true identity.
Klara is one of the few characters who manages to defy consumerism and create an identity for herself. This process is not easy, however. She begins life as Klara Sachs, becomes Klara Bronzini by marriage, and then renames herself Klara Sax. The final name represents Klara as she identifies herself. It is the name she has chosen for herself as an artist, creating a distance between herself as an individual and her past as a daughter or a wife. She signs her work with the name Sax, selling her identity to others, rather than buying items to create an identity as other characters do. Klara Sax, as she is portrayed at the beginning of the novel, seems far more comfortable and at peace than any of the earlier iterations of herself. By asserting her identity and reversing consumerism, she finds a peace that eludes the other characters.
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By Don DeLillo
