The intertwining of baseball, history, and nuclear tension in Underworld

What is the opening scene and historical context?

Underworld was written by di Don DeLillo in 1997.

The book opens with a prologue that makes regret not being American, not for affection but to better feel the vibrations of the crowd delirious with Bobby Thomson home run of the launch of Ralph Branca Dodgerr of the historical competition between New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers of October 3, 1951 at the Polo Grounds in New York who scored a memorable moment of baseball, American sport par excellence, almost unknown in our latitudes.

Characters and symbolic elements

The game characters of all kinds are present and extraction, some known then passed on the pages of history books, like J. Edgar Hoover, obsessed with a painting: The Triumph of Death, whose reproduction in an advertising flyer he happens in his hands during the game (giving the title to the first chapter).
Popular on the stands there is a little black boy, Martin Cotter who skipped school and jumped the turnstiles to attend the event, it is he, the lucky one who catches the ball in the home run and the ball will be the common thread that pass from hand in hand, stolen, sold, traded, donated, for nearly 40 years, since the beginning of the Cold War in '92, will weave the warp of this immense fresco of American and world history.

The same day of the game happens an epochal event radically different level: The Russians completed their second nuclear test and the roar mixes and mingles with the roar of the crowd in a dark symbolism that pervades the entire book, a sense of impending threat He will accompany the whole narrative.