Underworld is divided into eleven parts: six narrative sections, a prologue, an epilogue, and three sections narrated from the perspective of Manx Martin. Each section is marked by nonchronological shifts among times and locales, beginning with the onset of the Cold War and culminating in the post-Cold War 1990’s. DeLillo links the Soviet Union’s first detonation of an atomic device, on October 3, 1951, with the famous Brooklyn Dodgers-New York Giants baseball playoff game that occurred on the same date. This connection between a sports game and a geopolitically dramatic weapons test—two “shots heard ’round the world,” in the parlance of the times—becomes the central reference point for the actions, conflicts, and intersections of characters in the novel.
The novel is narrated from the points of view of all of its major characters, and it shifts intermittently between first-person and third-person narration. Underworld begins at the famous Dodgers-Giants playoff. DeLillo’s interconnection of both “shots heard ’round the world” is clear from the outset, because one of the celebrity spectators attending the game is Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover hears news from an aide of the atomic test just before Bobby Thomson comes to bat. Moments later, as outfield fans scuffle for the game-winning home-run ball, Hoover considers the possibilities of the new age just inaugurated by the Soviet test. Hoover’s historically...
(The entire section is 613 words.)