Hal and Gately converged in some ways near the end. Both end up attending Ennet house meetings, and are connected to Joelle, and have a dangerous addiction to drugs, but there's more....

I feel like we a got a lot of horizontal or reposed imagery near the end, especially with the two of them. There was the scene where Hal was lying in his room and can't get up (902), and the scene with Gately falling onto the floor when he's really drugged up (938), Gately being stuck in the hospital bed, and of course the end, with Gately lying on the cold sand at the beach. All of these reposed positions kept evoking a death/corpse image for me.

Okay, still got quite a bit of reading to do, but as I've been reading, I keep thinking about this: from the moment I read Jim Incandenza's microwave-related death on April Fools (and Hal's reaction about something smelling delicious), I've been wondering if every death in this novel is going to be interlaced with some sort of humor. I remember the man who was robbed in the beginning of the novel, and died from a stuffy nose after the robbers put tape over his mouth.

And now we get the absolutely absurd story of Eric Clipperton, who swears he'll shoot himself if he should ever lose a tennis match, and then blows his head away when he's marked first on the rankings. The people at ETA compare him to the Kid who laced his Nestle Quik with cyanide after winning a tournament, and is discovered by his dad, who tries to give him CPR. Then every single member of his family (including the little medically-trained siblings) proceeded to give CPR to the last person who tried to recessitate someone in the family, and "by the end of the nigth the whole family's lying there blue-hued and stiff as posts, with incrementally tinier amounts of lethal Quik smeared around their rictus-grimaced mouth" (437). That moment was tragic, but also sort of amusing to me... very darkly comical.

I find it interesting that the Ennet House Drug and Alchohol Recovery House (sic) is right next to the Enfield tennis academy, because it got me thinking about some parallels between tennis and drugs (or more specifically, sports obsession and substance addiction).

When the book was going over some of the things that addicts/mental patients learn during recovery, it kept mentioning a bunch of strategies and lessons patients are taught in order to regain control of their lives. These continous lessons of control reminded me of the strict sports lessons of James's Incandenza's father, which were then taught by James to his son, Hal (especially those regarding controlling your body). I'm drawing closer parallels between mental patients and tennis players as the novel goes on, in their similarly obsessive, struggling, carefully monitored existence.

So.... we've finished, and I've arrived at what I assume is a cliché question for this novel: Why is the last word "Peace" (827)?

Clearly, the novel has been deconstructing the Cold War, and the physical and psychological destruction it caused despite being "cold" (ex: the children with deformities, the nuclear waste, the fear and paranoia). So does the word represent Dellilo's plea? His wish?

Nick himself seems to have settled into some form of acceptance with himself and his life, but he says: "I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked the real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself" (810). Nick does not long for peace, but for the days of his irrational youthful anger and readiness for violence. Perhaps he is a victim of the Cold War era, then, and can never exist happily in a world of peace. He was a child of the Cold War, and his identity was constructed on that mentality.

The marriage and sexual politics in this book continue to be very oddly soap-operalike and filmic to me. Or at least, the characters want their sex lives/marriages to be like a film.

Remember the part we discussed in class about Nick confronting Marian about her closeness with Brian? He wished he'd stood at the door so he could say something ominous about the potential affair and then walk away.... as if he wanted to make their marriage to play out like a drama. Nick wants to perfect the theatrics of domestic life.

Well it seems his brother is trying to do the same with Janet before their marriage, hoping she'll ask him to leave her job and get married.

One theme that has been recurring in Underworld is the theme of waste and garbage. Not only are several strorylines and characters (including a main protagonist, Nick Shay) involved in Waste management, but the more I read the more garbage seems to have a secret but immense effect on human life in the book. The people who work for waste management seem to be in on this secret, however, and admire the influence of garbage:

Nick's life, for example, seems to revolve around thoughts of garbage, even outside of work: "Marian and I saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We didnt' say, What king of casserole will that make? We said, What king garbage will that make?" (121) This passage is particularly interesting because this couple immediately sees beneath the newness and wonder what an item's destruction will look like.

Although I'm sure some of it went over my head, I was particularly fond of the long chapter in section 4 that was broken down into short snippets of moments and stories. This section is near the end of the novel (in the 700's pages) and I feel that it opens up some new ideas while pulling others together (especially regarding Slothrop). I'm just going to talk about a few of the sections I thought were interesting and see what you guys think.

Quite a few of these sections dealt with Slothrop, specifically his childhood and his family. One section, called "Mom Slothrop's Letter to Embassador Kennedy" was particularly interesting to me because it's essentially a letter where Slothrop's mother self-consciously expresses her serious concern for little Tyrone. She came off as an intensely depressed woman who drowns her sorrows in a falsely cheery demeanor and one too many martini's. She begins the letter very playfully, but says she feels like "they're pieces of the Heavenly City falling down." She says "Sometimes things aren't very clear [...] in my heart I kep getting this terrible fear, this empty place, and it's very hard at times to really belive in a Plan with a shape bigger than I can see" (682 in my book). Perhaps she feels regret and confusion about the things Tyrone is being subjected to, but is grappling with the people who tell her that it is necessary. I think this highlights the plight of multiple characters in this book who are working towards a cause they don't fully understand, or are driven by anonymous powers and forces.

I've still got some reading to go, but I'm starting to notice a lot of focus on children in this section, and so I thought I'd jot down my thoughts on the darker side of innocense and youth.

It's interesting that the novel describes innocence as a valuable resource that a state can package/preserve/manufacture: "In a corporate State, a place must be made for innocence, and its many uses. In developing an official version of innocence, the culture of childhood has proven invaluable." (419 in my book).. then it goes on to describe "Zwolfkinder", the eerie resort that's run completely by children. And while this place is supposed to be the ideal fairyland, it clearly has a cryptic side (easily visible in the not-so-innocent children). Polker takes his daughter Ilse there, but she is clearly irreparably damaged by her stay in the Dora camp. And the boys she looks at in Zwolfkinder ignore her, because "They dreamed of their orders, of colossal explosions and death [...] someday I will have a herd of [women] for myself... but first I must find my captain... somewhere out in the War... first they must deliver me from this little place..." (429). These boys have already outgrown the make-believe world of childhood, and are preparing themselves for a life of violence and sex. It seems as if innocence is just a guise that children wear.

This section has ventured away from the goings-on of Europe for some time, which was refreshing, since war clearly affects more regions than the West. It ventured into the Middle East, as well as China presumably near or around the time of the opium wars (certainly during the time when the economy was thriving due to opium sales, but the people were falling into addiction and not able to alleviate their despair --> discussed on pg 346-347 in my book).

The book addressed colonialism rather poignantly, in one of my favorite passages: "Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul [...] Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death, and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marbel statues, noble thoughts... No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enought to absorb all behavior[...]" (317).

One rather broad theme/idea that I stumbled upon rather consistently (even in stream-of-consciousness passages that we agree were somewhat baffling), was the idea of chaos and reversal of order.

The line between reality and fantasy is pretty blurred (Pirate having a "strange talent for getting inside the fantasies of others" (12), the giant Adenoid taking over London (14), the dog who talks to Jessica and Mexico (44)... etc.). This fantasy element actually made me think about the film Pan's Labrynth. The movie is set during wartime in pre-facist Spain, and weaves elements of fantasy and violence in order to highlight the absurd, surrealist aspect of war. Everyone seems to be trying to create a pattern within in the chaos, an explanation for the madness and disarray of war. The best example for this, I think, is the continuous work to find connections between Slothrop's sexual climaxes and the bombings (and not even just a regular bombing, but when the explosion happens in reverse). As professor Rozsavolgyi explains to Mr. Pointsman: "When given an unstructured stimulus, some shapelss blob of experience, the subject, will seek to impose structure on it." (81)