Underworld

Nick is the closest Underworld comes to having a protagonist. His character connects many of the disparate stories together, either through his love affair with Klara or his experience of Sister Edgar as his teacher. The structure of the novel presents a clear difference between the younger and the older versions of Nick. Told in a nonlinear fashion, the novel presents the older Nick as a jaded and alienated figure, someone who is willing to drive out into the middle of the desert to recapture a tingle of the passion he once felt for Klara, someone who is willing to spend a large sum of money on a baseball from a game that his team lost and that is impossible to authenticate. This older version of Nick is unsatisfied with his existence, and as a result he looks relentlessly into the past in search of meaning. He hopes that chasing down the artifacts and echoes of his youth will reveal to him what went wrong with his life. Nick’s problem, however, is that he is so alienated that he cannot recognize his alienation as a social rather than an individual problem. He delves deeper and deeper into his own past, unwilling to acknowledge that his comfortable but meaningless present may be the cause for his—and many others’—dissatisfaction with the state of the world.