MDMD(1): Commentary

[David Casseres]

>And there maybe is the key opposition which underpins this book and, I
>suspect, Pynchon's morality, the meta-opposition between opposition
>and non-opposition, discord and harmony, division and integration,
>death and life. If Mason & Dixon is going to tell us anything we
>didn't already hear in Gravity's rainbow then it has to be about life,
>not death.

Pynchon has always placed a very high value on friendship of all kinds.  
He's never the least bit cynical, paranoid, or jaded about it, as far as 
I can recall.  But it hasn't really been a major theme before now, even 
in Vineland, which seems like the closest predecessor to Mason & Dixon in 
terms of emotional tone.

In Mason & Dixon, friendship is clearly at the heart of the narrative.  
These guys want to be friends from their first meeting, and perhaps even 
from their first exchange of letters, and the story so far seems to be 
shaping up as the story of a friendship, or at least a story built around 
a friendship.


Cheers,
David