ABSTRACT
Yet this game, the so-called ‘Shot Heard Round the World’ has a double meaning, a dark ‘counter-history’.2 If Americans remember October 3rd 1951, it is for the Thomson home run rather than for the moment when the Soviet Union tested its second atomic bomb at a nuclear test site in Kazakhstan, a moment then noted by the White House as unmasking dark ‘Soviet pretensions’ of peaceful atomic development.3 Published on the fortysixth anniversary of the third deciding playoff game for the 1951 National
League Pennant, Underworld’s prologue recreates the action of the day while the remainder of the narrative explores its enormous, engulfi ng irony. And from this doubly faceted moment, DeLillo spins a web of interlinked characters, events, themes and narratives, all of which revolve around the white baseball pitched into the crowd at Shea Stadium. Thus the white ball, the point of collective experience and the key to unlocking its historical connections, is both the reader’s and the various characters’ white whale, sought after throughout the text yet perennially out of reach.
