GRGR(3) pre-empting Katje

[rj]

> Katje is one of the saddest figures in the text

This is, of course, Enzian's perhaps disingenuous and condescending
conclusion about Katje, offered to her as something of a taunt in that
unbearable spurned lovers' oneupmanshipping bitchfight they have late in
the novel. At the recognition of which Katje begins to flirt like a
coquette!

cfa:
> It is certainly fair to suggest that Katje exhibits a distressing 
> moral sense (if any at all), but I recall there being some trigger 
> event described, some betrayal which sent her over the edge.

Yeah, I've got a similar recollection, but I think it is only an
insinuation -- Katje's take. What I think it boils down to is "all men
are bastards". Except for Pirate, of course; but she double crosses him
anyway, just for the heck of it!

Rich:
> come on guys, he put a fucking kid in a rocket.  What is Gottfried like 
> frieking 16!!!? we feel some sort of sympathy for Weissman, but...
> we should regret that he didn't go up himself, the coward.  And he's a major 
> coward, no matter what mittelwerke says.

But Katje has the opportunity to warn/free Gottfried when she escapes,
only she can't be bothered to. She lets it happen. At least, that's the
way I read it.

I can't really see a moral/immoral dichotomy working in the novel,
because, of course, that sort of thing depends on which side of the
fence you're sitting; but I think a moral/amoral one can be more easily
identified and described. Blicero launches Gottfried as a (magnificent)
gesture of love. The boy is a passive and willing victim. There is
morality in operation here, even if it is unhinged by insanity. By
contrast, Katje has battery acid in her veins.

Condemnation of Blicero's 'experiment' in love need to be measured
against and tempered by those of his Anglo-Celtic Doppelganger in the
text -- Mr. Edward W.A. Pointsman F.R.C.S. (any takers on the formality
of this introduction? the given initials?)

David M (re dogs):
> Now Pointsman, though, cuts them up alive, tortures them.  And he can't live
> w/ one.  That pretty well establishes him as a villain.

Brendo:
> Spectro to Pointsman: "I only wonder if you'd feel the same way without all
> those dogs about.  If your subjects <sic> all along had been human."

And, Pointsman indeed takes that extra step, with Slothrop and Katje.

Further, that whole Hansel, Gretel, Wicked Witch and Oven thing which
Blicero plays out with Gottfried and Katje is surely imagery drenched in
and redolent of the Holocaust as well -- but I guess it's a smell which
won't find favour with those who seek confirmation for systems of moral
orthodoxy in this text.

best