Slothrop

[rj]

Well, jch, Slothrop's just this guy, y'know...

Way I read it, Slothrop assumes any number of identities through the
course of the novel, most of the time accidentally and unwillingly: Ian
Scuffing, Plechauzunga, Rocket Man. His quest---if he even has one which
I don't think consciously he does---his quest is to rid himself of all
the forces of control which provoke him to do the things and act the way
he does: Pointsman, Mom and Dad ("as Broderick progresses into
Pernicious Pop and Nalline into ssshhhghhh . . . "682), of the Puritan
heritage of his forebears, even of the village folk who mistake him for
their pig-god, even of Ludwig and Ursula, and even down to the molecular
and genetic levels (Jamf's conditioning, WASPish fear of blackness and
the corollary shit=death reflex). It's a quest for freedom basically,
but mostly he's just bumbling *away* from these things which purport to
control his actions, a negative quest if you like, or a quest for
negation. At first he seeks this freedom in "dreams, psychic flashes,
omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of
terror, contradiction, absurdity"582---sex and drugs and rock and roll,
basically. But these provide temporary escape only. And this is where
the anonymity, non-identity bit comes in, I think. He escapes into "the
Zone" where the systems of control aren't in operation yet. And, having
thus freed himself to a point where like some bizarro Orpheus he
retrieves his dulcifer-harp in the clear running waters of some Northern
crystal stream, he is *even so* still in thrall of one more control
system: the novel, resolution of the textual narrative itself, Pynchon
the 'intentional' author. And so, finally and ultimately, he is
liberated from his "chroniclers" and our last glimpses of him are
apocryphal, rumours only. Was that really him on the back of that record
album (Lotion's?)? And so forth.

Slothrop's final 'dialogue' in _GR_, deliberately ambiguous though it
is, is an affirmation both of mortality and life:

"Dying a weird death," Slothrop's Visitor by this time may be scrawled
lines of carbon on a wall, voices down a chimney, some human being out
on the road, "the object of life is to make sure you die a very weird
death. To make sure that *however it finds you*, it will find you under
*very weird* circumstances. To live that kind of life. . . . "(742)

This is Slothrop at his most certain, most emphatic, and it is as close
to a philosophy of existence as Pynchon ever allows.

There's a further dimension. Freeing Slothrop into the world of the
reader is also Pynchon's gift to us. He becomes a part of
us---symbolically and also by virtue of the truths we've been shown in
the course of *our* observation of him in the text (as readers we're a
bit like Pointsman, neh?)---his miraculous escape enriches us and brings
hope along with the new way of seeing it augurs.

best