End Zone is very much a novel of its time. Written in 1972, amidst the height of the Cold War, the novel engages with many of the societal themes and quandaries of the era. Most prominent is the presence of nuclear warfare and destruction. Protagonist Gary Harkness, portrayed as a typical American football star, displays a growing fascination with nuclear destruction. He envisions widespread evisceration of whole cities and has a near-encyclopedic knowledge of warfare concepts. In this sense, he acts as a symbol of the American obsession with violence and dominance, as seen in the Vietnam War. He is both a product and producer of the environment of fear and paranoia. Football is also directly compared to warfare as well. The violence and competition of a game as arbitrary as football are juxtaposed against the very real threat of war and megadeath.
At the same time, End Zone also engages with themes of race and racism. Taft Robinson, an African-American running back, is the first black player ever to play at Logos College, where the novel is set. He is admired for his prowess on the football field, yet the precarious position of his race is poorly understood his teammates. They fetishize both his talents and his blackness. As the novel concludes, Robinson converts to Islam and abandons football, a move which confounds his teammates. Through this action, he finds a freedom that was not possible on the football field. The confusion of his white teammates demonstrates their lack of racial sensitivity.
End Zone is an overwhelmingly male-dominated text. The vast majority of characters are men, who display stereotypically masculine characteristics. For example one chapter involves a character watching females walk by as he says pejorative terms such as "gash" and "pussy." Yet throughout this social dynamic there are also rumblings of homosexuality and gender queerness. For example, a rumor spreads around the team that one of the football players is "queer." The other players are fascinated by this possibility. Furthermore, one of the characters is known to possess a dress, though he is not questioned about it. At one point Harkness sees a figure wearing the dress through a window and it is intimated that it could be a male. In this sense, the tenuousness and problematic nature of masculine culture is highlighted, through the hyper-masculine sport of football.
The novel also contains many ruminations on the nature of communication. There are frequent intentional miscommunications throughout the novel and instances where meaningful speech between characters is seemingly impossible. There is frequent wordplay and subtle humors, a common trait of works by DeLillo, in his gesture towards the sheer complexity of verbal interaction. While it is a short work at just over 200 pages, End Zone is a remarkably dense and analytically-rich text.
