GRGR(12) comments

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Film and Identity

Where is the camera in this chapter?

Slothrop is growing quite accustomed to his role as
role-player. He has no identity as a conditioned IG Farben
golem. Later Enzian says, "all we know about you is that you
keeps showing up.' Shortly, Slothrop will be named (I think
this the most important scene in the novel) Raketemensch,
thus having the emptiness of his association with the rocket
Confirmed and he will gain Celebrity in  the zone. Slothrop
is the focus of conspiracy and an "illusionist" playing Ian
Scuffling, Max Schlepzig, Plechazunga. But even his
celebrity will not keep him give him personality--the sad
paradox, conditioned personality/no personality or a
pristine state without "ascribed" personality/no
personality. His seems to be a quester, an Oedipus, but his
revelations serve to debilitate and fly apart, and scatter
like broken rocket parts and the lives they shatter.
Knowledge seems to bring not renewal, but collapse. Poor
dude, I am reminded that he once cared, he even prayed
"conventionally to God...for life to win out. But too many
were dying, and presently, seeing no point, he stopped."
Slothrop withdrawn, moving to a dead soul neutrality,
feelingless. numbed by fear and conspiracy. Here he begins
to learn of the rocket, Imipolex G, can you imagine, my
parents? No. My education, god, no I don't pray. As his
belief, his feelings wane, he learns more of the rocket.
Remember Slothrop in the casino, through grand simile
Slothrop equals a rocket:

Like a rocket, whose valves, under remote control, open and
close at prearranged moments, Slothrop, at a certain level
of his re-entry into sleep, stops breathing through his nose
and commences breathing through his mouth,"

The rocket, here in Zurich we are reminded that the rocket
is connected to the cartels, to commercial interests of the
kind that cut lines, that established colonies in Africa,
and elsewhere, ravaging those lands, bad history, and
Slothrop has been, if more subtly exploited, victimized, by
his own parents, by IG Farben, his body conditioned to
stimuli in the service of others like a slave girl that
bends to her masters lust. Like a man with a clock for a
heart and wires under the skin, "his erection hums from a
certain distance, like an instrument installed, wired by
Them into his body as a colonial outpost here in our raw and
clamorous world, another office representing Their white
Metropolis far away..." 


"The song was in Hottentot dialect, and Mondaugen couldn't
understand it." V..297

"Half the Camp hears it. Some take it for Indian. Axmen say,
if so, 'tis a Nation they have not yet encounter'd" M&D.610