DeLillo's critics have accused him of drawing flat characters who serve as mouthpieces for the author's own theories. As in all of DeLillo's novels, Underworld's characters do have intellectual discussions about various topics, debating philosophies of political power, global capitalism, film, avantgarde art, and, of course, baseball. However, Underworld does contain many wellrounded portrayals, sustaining DeLillo's reputation as a chronicler of interior lives as well as cultural phenomena.

In a novel with more than a hundred characters, including twenty or so who will be discussed below, let us start with the most famous and some of the most vividly portrayed: Lenny Bruce, Frank Sinatra, and J. Edgar Hoover. Bruce appears in Part Five, doing a series of monologues on (and during) the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which a recurring punch-line is "We're all gonna die!" Evidence of DeLillo's gifts with language, the novelist invented all of these routines...