Running Dog by Don DeLillo
Published 1978 · 368 pages · 58,983 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Thriller
How hard is Running Dog to read?
Running Dog scores 62 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 48 out of 100
- DeLillo's prose is deliberately spare and contemporary — clipped dialogue, declarative narration, no archaic vocabulary or specialized jargon. The register is polished American vernacular: accessible, precise, and stripped of ornamentation. Occasional phrases emerge in German (Alles nach Gottes Willen), and the novel deploys intelligence-community acronyms (PAC/ORD, Radial Matrix) as texture, but context supplies meaning. Sits below 2666 (65) and closer to The Great Gatsby (45).
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- DeLillo favors parataxis throughout: short declarative sentences, abrupt scene-cuts, fragmented action beats. Dialogue is clipped and ironic, often without attribution. Even longer passages — Mudger's monologue about technology and guilt, the film-screening sequence — remain syntactically clean. The prose resists subordination and hypotaxis. Comparable to 1984 (35) in directness, with marginally more stylistic intentionality in the rhythm of accumulation.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- The novel meditates on surveillance, political corruption, pornography, and the commodification of taboo — but thought arrives through situation and dialogue rather than philosophical digression. Mudger's speech on how pervasive technology makes ordinary citizens feel like criminals is the novel's most explicitly abstract moment. Otherwise ideas are embedded in concrete images and exchanges. Above 1984 (35), comparable to The Great Gatsby (58), but with a harder ideological edge.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Multiple interwoven plot threads — Moll's investigation into PAC/ORD, Selvy's double identity and flight, Lightborne's pursuit of the bunker film, Mudger's retirement maneuvers, Senator Percival's committee — compress considerable backstory and institutional detail into a short novel. Each chapter introduces new characters and layers. Dense but not maximalist; comparable to Lolita (65) in richness without the encyclopedic schema of War and Peace (80).
- Narrative indirection: 60 out of 100
- Selvy's true identity and allegiances are withheld and only gradually assembled; the nature of PAC/ORD remains deliberately opaque; the film's significance resonates beyond what characters can articulate. The second-person opening chapter drops the reader into an anonymous consciousness that only later coheres. DeLillo provides enough scaffolding that events remain followable, but the reader must actively construct the network of loyalties. More indirect than 1984 (35), comparable to The Great Gatsby (65).
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- The bunker film is the novel's central symbol: a simultaneously pornographic and historical object that collapses desire, political evil, voyeurism, and commodity into a single canister. What arrives as Nazi sex footage turns out to be Eva Braun's home movies of a trembling Hitler performing Chaplin — deflating the pornographic quest into domestic pathos. The 'running dog' motif — Selvy's Indian name, the magazine title, the structure of pursuit — threads through the whole. Less totalizing than Moby-Dick (90), more purposeful than Heart of Darkness (65).
- Ironic distance: 72 out of 100
- DeLillo maintains cool authorial detachment from all characters, letting the gap between their ambitions and outcomes supply the meaning. The novel's structural irony is the pornographic non-event: collectors, intelligence operatives, and pornography merchants converge on footage they expect to be darkly transgressive, only to find a dying man impersonating a silent-film tramp for frightened children. This deflation operates across the whole novel's economy of desire and conspiracy. Closer to Pale Fire (78) than to Lolita (75) in the coldness of the ironic distance.
- Resolution withholding: 75 out of 100
- Selvy is killed by the Vietnamese rangers; the film proves anticlimactic; Moll walks out without explanation; Lightborne is visited by Augie the Mouse, whose intentions remain unstated. No political corruption is exposed, no quest succeeds, no love plot resolves. The second reel continues screening to an empty room. The novel ends in dissipation rather than revelation, its conspiracy threads left dangling. Comparable to 2666 (92) in its refusal of satisfying closure, though the structure is more conventionally novelistic.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- The novel opens with an anomalous second-person chapter (the cross-dresser who is killed) before establishing its multi-POV structure alternating Moll, Selvy, Lightborne, and Mudger. Parallel storylines converge only partially and without catharsis. The climactic film-screening sequence functions as a text-within-text, with DeLillo's narration shifting into screenplay-style description. More complex than straightforward dual-protagonist fiction but far below Pedro Paramo (80) or Flights (88); comparable to Midnight's Children at 68 without the temporal fragmentation.
How Running Dog is regarded
Running Dog holds a literary regard score of 58 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.