Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1998) focuses on the postmodern popular culture, depicting the accumulation of heaps of waste due to mass consumption. It locates the events in the technologically-oriented environment. Underworld depicts the latter half of the twentieth century American life. Apart from this, the novel highlights the production and dumping of waste. For the purpose, DeLillo uses Bobby Thompson’s home run, throws light on the commercial waste, looks at food from a new perspective, and studies nuclear waste, it being the most durable and long-lasting form of waste. This paper uses Underworld as a lens to explore how DeLillo dramatizes the events in his fiction with its insistence on waste, junk, and rubbish in the material and immaterial world. The focus is on how he discusses the trivial but crucial nature of waste.

This paper concerns itself with Don DeLillo’s fiction and its relationship to ‘waste’ as a significant fact of contemporary American life, especially in his magnum opus Underworld. Waste appears in a number of guises in DeLillo’s Underworld. The aim of this paper is to study how a novel by a contemporary American writer dealing with contemporary world events might be used to reflect something about the piling up of waste in the world today. DeLillo has remarkably described ‘waste’ using a number of characters and from numerous aspects, relating it to the ball, commercial waste, food, and nuclear waste. Here ‘waste’ is a symbol of transience, as also depicted in Rubbish! The Archeology of Garbage by Rathje and Cullen (2001), Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Royte (2006), and On Garbage by Scanlan (2004). For DeLillo, an attempt at recycling this waste and changing it into a commodity is another positive outlook towards life in the present commercial world.

In Underworld, DeLillo (1997, 120)1 offers us an etymology of ‘waste’: “Waste is an interesting word that you can trace through Old English and Old Norse back to the Latin, finding such derivatives as empty, void, vanish, and devastate.” Underworld offers us the missing link between objects and bodies. For DeLillo, this link is garbage which is the world of discarded objects with which we surround ourselves individually and collectively. Royte (2006) also reminds us that our decisions about consumption and waste have a very real impact, and unless we make some serious changes in the way we think about and approach our waste, the garbage we create will always be with us.

DeLillo starts Underworld with the depiction of the legendary Giants-Dodgers’ baseball World Series playoff game on October 3, 1951. At 3:58 p.m., the final home run ball, hit by Bobby Thompson of the Giants, disappears into the audience. The ball is now a used one: which has also lost its actual exchange- and use-value. The ball has both lost and gathered value during its victorious flight from Thompson’s bat into the madding crowd. The value of its aura is well known by its audience which creates a hullabaloo and even a fight over the ball’s possession as soon as it lands among the spectators in Underworld:

And Cotter is under a seat handfighting someone for the baseball. He is trying to get a firmer grip. He is trying to isolate his rival’s hand so he can prize the ball away finger by finger.

It is a tight little theater of hands and arms, some martial test with formal rules of grappling.

American Literature Journal, Amor in Pound, Classical European Literature, Homosexuality, Diastasis, Olga-Circe-Artemis, Heterosexual Love, Homosexual Love.