Interpretive Inquiry: Comparing "Pafko at the Wall" and "The Americans"

Don DeLillo’s novella, Pafko at the Wall, captures a moment of American spectacle so layered and climactic that it frames as myth. It highlights the 1951 Giants vs. Dodgers game through a crowd of spectators, celebrities, politicians, and an enthusiastic Harlem boy, before tragedy struck Pafko at the stadium wall. With its punchy, realistic dialogue, imagery, and intentional shifts in perspective, DeLillo engulfs the reader in both the intimacy of individual experience and the broader social tapestry, showing how a single event can crystallize collective anxieties, cul

tural obsessions, and historical tensions. Robert Frank’s photography series, The Americans, provides visual form to similar figures, depicting ordinary Americans and revealing the social contradictions of loneliness and quiet tensions that underlie the post-war American society outside the polo grounds. Comparing these works demonstrates how public performance and everyday reality intersect. DeLillo narrates how the cohesion of a crowd and news emphasize a cultural moment, while Frank gives faces and bodies to the kinds of people who populate those crowds, grounding the myth in lived experience. Together, the novella and photographic series illuminate how mid-century American culture oscillated between the fantasy of collective identity and the fragmented truths of daily life, exposing both the performative and contested nature of American postwar memory.

DeLillo situates Pafko at the Wall within the charged atmosphere of postwar America, a period when the nation’s favorite pastime offered three brief hours in which the deep undercurrents of Cold War anxiety and nuclear dread seemed suspended, at least for those who weren’t J. Edgar Hoover. The show goes on for everyone: for Russ Hodges, sweating through a relentless fever; for Frank Sinatra, his polished shoes now sticky with beer and spit-up; and for Cotter, the Harlem boy whose common-man perspective grounds the spectacle. It is this multiperspectivity, this insistence on character alongside play-by-play, that enables DeLillo to capture how entertainment and unease coexist in the same emotional space. In doing so, the home run is not the true climax. Instead, the highlight is the chaotic, layered human drama unfolding all around it. Frank’s photography manages something similar. An iconic book, The Americans showcases 83 photographs, chosen from over 27,000 images shot during Frank’s travels across the U.S. between 1955 and 1956, with the final sequence meticulously selected for its narrative and thematic power. Small moments highlighted reveal the fractures beneath America’s mid-century optimism. 

Robert’s images are overwhelmingly lonely, regardless of the numerous subjects. The figures he captures seem suspended in their own private worlds, and this loneliness is documented in a way throughout each image that turns it from fact into a mythic condition of the Americans of the 1950s. His photographs elevate his subjects into symbols of a nation wrestling with its own contradictions, turning everyday individuals into archetypes of alienation, forceful mingling, and restlessness. Each image feels as though you’re missing a key contextual clue, and one person always stands out. In image #1 it’s the woman left of the flag, with two faceless people next to each other. Who is she with, and who is she hiding from? Or the 21st image, with the faceless man fading into the stairwell. The cane gives away age, the hat inferring status, yet no signs of identity. His subjects are framed as if caught between presence and erasure, individuals defined as much by what we cannot see as by what is shown. The resulting ambiguity turns each photograph into a fragment of a larger, inaccessible narrative, a reminder that American identity in the 1950s was shaped by what remained uncertain. DeLillo’s approach in Pafko at the Wall offers a striking inversion of this dynamic.

In Frank’s work, the people are the mystery. Their expressions contextless, their relationships unclear, their inner lives withheld. But in DeLillo’s novella, it is not the people who are opaque, but the event itself. Baseball, this national ritual, this defining American symbol, becomes the mythic, elusive force. The crowd, celebrities, and anonymous fans do not obscure the meaning of the moment, but animate it. When readers encounter the atmosphere outside the polo grounds before the game, the folklore and lack of decorum already begin to frame the spectacle as myth, rugged like the Greeks. Boys leap over fences, and as legend has it, “only four will get through for every one that’s caught” (DeLillo 36). Audience members funnel themselves through the lanes, eagerly following the pregame “babble and swirl,” embodying a communal anticipation that transforms a sporting event into a show. It is here that we first meet Cotter Martin, the Harlem boy shouting his way through the crowd because it “makes him brave,” a figure whose urgency and thrill help anchor the mythic atmosphere in lived, human experience. Where Frank’s images suggest individuals adrift in their own interior worlds, DeLillo shows individuals whose presence collectively generates meaning. In The Americans, people are unknowable fragments of a larger loneliness, where in Pafko at the Wall, people are the connective tissue that makes the spectacle real. The contrast reveals two opposing strategies of mythmaking: Frank isolates his subjects to expose the dissonance within postwar America, while DeLillo embeds his characters in a charged communal moment that constructs a national myth out of noise, motion, and shared attention.

Both Pafko at the Wall and The Americans position their subjects within a nation contradicting itself. In DeLillo’s novella, these tensions surface subtly through dialogue and are embedded in the texture of the crowd rather than stated outright. The Cold War tensions aren’t all as explicit as FBI director J. Edgar Hoovers’, whose faced with it directly at the game, hearing from a secret agent amidst the gameplay that the “Soviet Union has conducted an atomic test at a secret location somewhere…They have exploded a bomb,” (DeLillo 41). The anxiety is everywhere, laced in every shout from Jackie Gleason to every cower from Frank Sinatra. Gleason is talking to multiple unsuspecting people, flirting loudly with numerous women who “enjoy it enormously” due to the “clarity of his wit” and the fine edge of his words between insult and derision. It’s a grab for attention and control, and he does so boisterously and messily. Sinatra, by contrast, shrinks from attention, trying to fold himself into the crowd as fans and onlookers seek his reactions to every play. His discomfort reveals the flip side of celebrity in an anxious nation: the longing to disappear even as others demand visibility. Everyone here together, showing their true colors displays the dichotomy of public spectacle and private fear, how the grandeur of baseball during this time coexisted with acute vulnerability. 

While the conversations between those in the stands are analytical and symbolic, the plays of the game are stated matter of factly, similar to the scenes presented in Frank’s photography. During a recollection of the half-innings, descriptions are blunt towards baseball, the flare seen in the reminiscence of their fans, “He sees Cox bang a shot past third that

nearly takes Thomson with it into left field. Russ is feeling dashed, that's the only damn word, and it's an effort for him to speak into the mike,” (DeLillo 49). The gameplay is for context, only a vessel to recall the illness Russ pushes and puff tobacco through to experience the pennant. Similarly, during the exact moment the Giants win the pennant, “Not a good pitch to hit, up and in, but Thomson swings and tomahawks the ball and everybody, everybody watches. Except for Gleason who is bent over in his seat, hands locked behind his neck, a creamy strand of slime swinging from his lips.” (DeLillo 59). It’s the shot heard round the world, the play that we’ve been tense about the whole story, and yet the focus is on Gleason;s drunken flamboyance.

Frank approaches those same tensions by making viewers look them in the face. The Americans offers a visual counterpoint to DeLillo’s mythic crowd, grounding its critique in explicit, often uncomfortable images of poverty, marginalization, and mental loneliness. Image #4, a man splayed out with a target on his chest, mirrors Gleason's booming dialogue. A fragile, masculine attempt at proving confidence and control through vivacious exposure. Image #7 in turn, visualizes the mind of Hoover, the man behind a desk, his face obscured as though identity itself has been consumed by bureaucracy, paranoia, and power. While Hoover puts on a brave face to the crowd and those next to him, his true wish is to hide behind the desk. Image #11, an image of apprehensive children in a train car, completely divergent from the scene of children described at the beginning of Pafko At The Wall, buzzing with myth and anticipation. The children in the eleventh image are waiting for orders, standing apprehensive. Their silence is the opposite of Cotter’s loud bravado. They aren’t fighting for the home-run ball, but cowering from it, and waiting to be ordered to. These contrasting portraits reveal how mid-century America fostered two realities at once, one in which children participate in a national show of joy, comradery, and belonging, alongside another in which children are rendered small and uncertain about the world they are inheriting.

The two works also share an undercurrent of spirituality. DeLillo builds a scene that resembles a kind of American liturgy, where baseball functions as a civic religion that temporarily replaces, or eclipses, traditional worship. DeLillo describes the patterns of the game as “undivinable”, and those who notice in the audience are thereby “touched by grace and fate.” (DeLillo 56). The game becomes the “mystery” at the center of the novella, a secular sacrament through which the nation sees itself, hopes for redemption, and reenacts its own founding myths. In a moment diverging from the narrative, DeLillo describes the audience’s passion for the game as their “faith” (DeLillo 37)., and that the pennant brought the city to a "strangulated rapture”. He uses the breaks from prose to preach how the 1951 Giants vs. Dodgers game can ultimately be turned into scripture in terms of American baseball anthology.

Frank’s documentary photographs contain their own spiritual charge. Instead of gathering people into a unified congregation around a shared spectacle, Frank fractures the illusion of American unity by documenting the private, the uncomfortable, and the unseen. Yet his images echo the logic of civil religion: they expose the symbols with flags, highways, parades, diners, that Americans unconsciously treat as sacred markers of national identity. The difference is that Frank strips these symbols of their innocence. Where DeLillo’s crowd experiences transcendence together, Frank’s subjects often appear spiritually isolated, caught in rituals that no longer offer redemption. The Americans portray a nation whose sacred myths still hover in the air but whose people struggle to find meaning within them.

This tension between belief and disillusionment emerges in both works alongside themes of science and technology. In Pafko at the Wall, the divide between secular ritual and scientific reality is highlighted through baseball’s mythic spectacle set against the backdrop of Cold War anxieties, where headlines about nuclear tests and physicists’ work intrude upon the established rhythms of the game. During the game, a radio producer exclaims “See that thing in the paper last week about Einstein?”, to which the engineer he is talking to has no recollection of who Einstein is. The engineer asks, “"The fuck does he know?". It is decided between the two that he doesn’t seem to know much, since he incorrectly predicted the Dodgers to eliminate the Giants the week prior. The moment illustrates how Americans negotiate uncertainty, by clinging to familiar rituals and communal spectacles even as the scientific and technological forces shaping their world, nuclear proliferation, Cold War tensions, and predictive expertise, loom large. The notions that Hoover is grappling with only meters from these two, are largely incomprehensible, and, in a sense, irrelevant to their immediate emotional and cultural experience. To the world, however, it’s substantially relevant, laced through everything. 

Scientific feat and technology is prevalent in The Americans in modes of transportation. The question is written on the faces of each subject depicted in a town car or train. Images eleven, twelve, and sixteen have people in it with looks on their faces that ask us all, what is the point? These faces show unnerving uncertainty. A quiet interrogation of progress, mobility, and modern life. While cars, buses, and trains demonstrate human development over distance and speed, the passengers appear suspended between movement and isolation, as if technology has advanced faster than their ability to find meaning or connection within it. These photographs were taken in 1956, yet published a year following the Soviets' shock launch of Sputnik 1. The Soviets, both in DeLillo’s novella and in these photographs are the rift between American comfort and unease. Whether it’s the atomic tests haunting the audience in DeLillo’s novella or the satellite hanging above Frank’s subjects, scientific minds in both pieces function as a reminder that American progress is always shadowed by competition and the knowledge that technological mastery does not guarantee spiritual or emotional certainty. In Pafko at the Wall, this is comforted by the escapism provided by the pennant. Frank’s photography is a jarring glimpse into life outside the polo grounds.

The historical contexts of both works make them captivating forms of journalism. 

Despite their different mediums, Pafko at the Wall and The Americans converge in their insistence that mid-century America was a nation suspended in illusion and spectacle. DeLillo’s novella captures a single afternoon when Americans come together in a moment of collective enchantment. His reporting style, years after the event, is what the print missed. The manufactured dialogues speak the truth of the nation’s anxieties and the way they present themselves in public spaces. The plays of the game are contextual, not the overriding theme, and that’s the case for many Americans in the stands that day. Novellas as journalism blend factual reporting with narrative fiction, using storytelling's power to make complex issues accessible and emotionally resonant, especially years after the event.

Frank, however, gathers the fragments that fall outside that frame, the lives of DeLillo’s audience outside the stadium. Photography transformed journalism, authenticating the words of the press. In Frank’s series, the audience is pictured outside the stadium. The groups they reside in no longer have the enthusiasm that takes form in the stands, as an audience rather than a crowd. appear in the stadium. His photographs ask what remains after the roar of the crowd fades, when they’re faced with the reality of post-war day-to-days. 

Reading Pafko at the Wall alongside analyzing The Americans shows that mid-century American culture was built on a delicate balance between spectacle and the avoidance of truth, with DeLillo put into prose and Frank forces us to face. The spectacle of baseball and Cold War “rapture” provided Americans with a temporary script through which to understand themselves, while Frank’s photographs remind us of the people who lived in the margins of that script, whose experiences complicate any attempt to define the nation through a single moment or image. Taken together, these works demonstrate that American memory is neither wholly mythic nor wholly documentary but forged in the space between the two. By holding DeLillo’s liturgical spectacle up against Frank’s stark visual record, we see a portrait of a nation trying to believe in itself even as it struggles to understand what, and who, that belief leaves behind.

ROBERT FRANK CITED IMAGES: link to all of them