During a section about Matti, DeLillo suddenly breaks out of the third person narrative and directly “questions” the reader. This happens twice. The first time is on page 402, “Do you work with sound waves? Do you gauge the effects of blast on delivery aircraft? Do you do physics packages and dream about a girl back in Georgia…” I’m not typing out the entire thing. The second occurrence is on page 413, when he writes, “Did you do grad work on solar energy? Did you do a paper on the trigger principle of nuclear fission….” (again, not typing out the entire thing). I wonder about the purpose of this, and what the intention is. I’m thinking this questioning relates to Matt questioning himself and his job. The questions are rather leading questions, after all. Or perhaps it is somehow giving the readers a certain view of the engineers. These passages made me think of one from “Gravity’s Rainbow”, when the Pyncheon writes about the engineer knowing that the V-2 was faster than sound, than the words she spoke across the table, etc.