Marvin Lundy (at home in New Jersey):

"People collect, collect, always collecting. There's people they go after anything out of wartime Germany, Naziana. This is major collectors looking for big history. Does that mean that the objects in this room are total trivia?...

"What am I, innocuous. This is history, back-page. Back to front. Happy, tragic, desperate....In this trunk right here I have the one thing that my whole life for the past twenty-two years I was trying to collect....

"I looked at a million photographs because this is the dot theory of reality, that all knowledge is available if you analyze the dots."

Myron Lounsbury

Sister Edgar (South Bronx):

Here in the Wall many people believed the government was spreading the AIDS virus, our government. Edgar knew better. The KGB was behind this particular piece of disinformation. And the KGB was responsible for the disease itself, a product of germ warfare -- making it, spreading it through networks of paid agents....

All street, these kids. No home or school. Edgar wanted to get them in a room with a blackboard and then buzz their heads with Spelling and Punctuation. She wanted to drill them in the lessons of the Baltimore Catechism. True or false, yes or no, fill in the blanks....

She was a cold war nun who'd once lined the walls of her room with Reynolds Wrap as a safeguard against nuclear fallout.

Sister Gracie (South Bronx):

Gracie dropped the crew at their building just as a bus pulled up. What's this, do you believe it? A tour bus in carnival colors with a sign in the slot above the windshield reading South Bronx Surreal. Gracie's breathing grew intense. About thirty Europeans with slung cameras stepped shyly onto the sidewalk in front of the boarded shops and closed factories and they gazed across the street at the derelict tenements in the middle distance.

Gracie went half berserk, sticking her head out the van and calling, "It's not surreal. It's real, it's real. Your bus is surreal. You're surreal."

Gracie shouting. "Brussels is surreal. Milan is surreal. The Bronx is real."

Myron Lounsbury

My primary interest with the Texas Highway Killer is not as a character but in the videotape or footage of his actual crime. Secondly I am trying to determine his motivation for committing what looks on the surface like random acts of violence. And lastly the significance of the video in the lives of not only the characters in the novel but all Americans.

With the videotape itself because it is a home video I have attempted to compare it to the footage we have seen lately by Mekas and Scorsese. It seems like with each tape, film serves to tell stories. Film as memory (recalling), it recycles our thoughts and acts as a communicative device just as books and audio aides do as well.

In chapter 2 subsection 10 we find out the Texas Highway Killer is Richard Henry Gilkes. Richard's motivation or reasoning behind his behavior seems to stem from an unsureness of who he really is. His inability to communicate with others leaves him isolated from the rest of the world. It seems as if the only way he knows how to interact with others is through these acts of violence which brings him into the attention and lives of not only the victims families but the general public thanks to the mass media as well. Similar to Valerie Solanas, he seems to be crying out for a recognition that will only come at the expense of others. "...Richard had to take everything outside, share it with others, become part of the history of others, because this was the only way to escape, to get out from under the pissant details of who he was." "He came alive in them. He lived in their histories, in the photographs in the newspaper, he survived in the memories of the family, lived with the victims, lived on, merged, twinned, quadrupled, continued into double figures.

Lastly why is the tape played over and over not only in the text but in the minds of millions of Americans. Many characters in the novel and others whose stories are not told become engrossed with the videotape. This leads me to our numerous discussions on why Americans are so attracted and captured with crimes and violence. What do Weegee's photos tell us about ourselves? Similarly what does the continual replay of the home video on the Texas Highway Killer say about Americans and their desensitized nature regarding violence?

Lynette Erbe

It seems to me that the majority of the characters DeLillo presents in Underworld are struggling to elude or even forget their pasts. The history however, that lies within each individula continually resurfaces and challenges them in their present day lives.

Nick -- Wants to forget about his years growing up in New York. At the baseball game with Glassic, Big Simms, and Jane he refuses to speak about his die-hard days as a Dodger fan. "These are local affiliations. They don't travel." Even his wife Marion cannot break through the barriers into Nick's elusive past. Her attempts to fill in "gaps and work out the details" of Nick's past are aided only by Nick's mother's arrival. "They talked about the things I did not talk about with Marion, the things I shrugged off when Marion asked, early girlfriends maybe or how I got along with my brother." Most importantly Nick denies every aspect related to his father's disappearance. His distrust in the reasoning or motivations behind his father's mysterious disappearance cause him to not understand and accept other notions of distrust prevalent in U.S. society.

Matt -- No longer is willing to play chess, a game he once dominated. Tries to erase all memories and associations connected with his job and the nature of his work in the summer of 1974. In addition Delillo has hinted at the effects Vietnam had and continues to have on Matt's very existence. "It (Vietnam) would redefine the limits of human perception and dread." For Matt "Everything he'd ever disbelieved or failed to imagine turned out, in the end, to be true."

Klara -- Does not want to "dispel the details of her private life " (including her past) even though she is a public figure. Although she makes and captures history with or through her artwork, as of late she has not been able to paint particularly with color. She can't seem to find the right place to begin and thereafter settle down into her work. Could something in her past, perhaps an event or person be troubling or complicated and consequentially be causing her inability to perform?

Texas Highway Killer -- Just found in Michael Dirda's review of Underworld the following quote from the killer "an individual should not be penalized for lifestyle type choices." It is now becoming apparent to me that possibly the Texas Highway Killer acts in such a violent manner because of opposition or negativity he faced in the past. Did he not conform to societal standards and as a result was treated harshly by mainstream society? Does he blame people like J. Edgar Hoover or even his victims for his oppression? Was the Texas Highway Killer a "black sheep"? Was he rejected from society like Valerie Solanas and saw no other choice but to act in that way that he did?

Lynette Erbe