GRGR(3) 50.31 Love Pointsman Style

[s~Z]

rj wrote:
> 
> s~Z wrote:
> >
> He's cruising the bus station in order to pick up one or more of
> Spectro's discharged patients who are still shell-shocked, right?

More specifically he's looking for the ones who have 'successfully'
abreacted. They are in the middle stages of the brainwashing procedure.
Tablets are erased. They are in a condition of powerlessness, fear, and
childlike dependency. Their old behavior and attitudes are suppressed. 
Now it is time to instill the new behavior and attitudes. Enter
Pointsman. That these blank slates are actually 'palimpsests shivering
under their government blankets' suggests that this isn't the first
time. And since this brainwashing procedure requires players on both
sides of the manifest war, who or what is the brainwasher? The Lord of
the Night. He's active on all sides of the war. And they are His
children.

> Whenever it switches to the "you" mode there's
> always this intrusive element, this sense that the text is breaking out
> of frame and addressing the reader directly, [...] an indictment of us for our complacency. 

This passage seems like an externalized narrator taking us inside
Pointsman's consciousness and making us see through his eyes, perhaps
more inclusively than even Pointsman himself can see. If it remained in
third person we'd be watching Pointsman in the bus station going about
and thinking about his business.  Reading it in second person I had the
experience of 'being' Pointsman and had no image of him in my
consciousness. All I saw was the scene and Pointsman's internal
apperception of it. As to whether or not this is the text addressing my
complacency...I don't know about that. Since the narrator is describing
Pointsman in a way that goes more deeply into his psyche than Pointsman
himself is able to do, perhaps it evokes the same in the reader.
Points to things inside us that are disowned and about which we are
complacent. At the very least it sucks me more deeply and intensely into
the character of Pointsman.