The War at Home

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

There's no place like home, and I guess there is no better
time to be at home with the family than Boxing Day. But in a
culture of death, where the voices you hear, Are of those
children who are learning to die, And the Tommy is sleeping
in a snowbank tonight, And the Jerries are learning to fly,
and rockets are falling just down the block, and scared
little babies cry, and fathers only leave, and she will
leave him, there's not time to grieve, as the angels sing,
in our polythene home in the sky
.

Penelope looks into the fish bowl and sees two goldfish,
very still, making a Pisces sign. 
A great deal has been written about Pisces and Part I, and
M. Perez and TG Quail and others contributed additional
information to GRGR.  One more idea merely adds to an
already disconcerting plethora of possibilities. Surely not
even our Mr. Pynchon can be responsible for all of these
allusions, even if he is culpable for some of our confusion.
Penelope is a name. Perhaps Pynchon has Homer in mind and
perhaps he does not. If he does, can we determine what a
sunkun galleon and two gold fish making a Pisces sign mean
to girl that has lost her father to the war? If we turn to
Homer's Penelope, Aphrodite, and Eros would complicate
things beyond reasonable conjecture. Should we, like
Mitchell Prettyplace, trace every last bit of symbolism,
engage in exhaustive research, and write an 18-volume study?
Or should we, like the Freudian Edwin Treacle, expose the
repressed, and say, your "dead father who never slept with
you, Penelope, returns night after night to your bed, trying
to snuggle behind you"???  So R&J take the kids to the
Pantomime and the Germans drop a rocket just as Gretel is
about to sweep the Witch into the oven and Gretel steps
towards the audience and everybody-including Roger-sings a
dreadful song of death. Poor Penelope, the present
dispensation, a house Demonically possessed, her father, the
Qlippoth, the shell of the dead, with a soft meaty slug of
soul, a conspiracy among the parents, all the fathers are
covering for each other, and she thinks perhaps it's better
to have a ghost than a father conditioned to die in certain
preferred ways. And Roger, such a child, how will he reason
this, rationalize his ill-fated Love for Jessica" Everyone
trying to figure out how, what, why the WAR, for me, for
you, for us, for---Damned Beaver/Jeremy is the War." "They
are insane," his insights seem to seep into the future and
the narrators distant perspective (as is the case so often
in this novel), and he dreams a child's innocence-before
wishes were given a separate name-and the children sing,
Hark, the herald angels sing and then Mrs. Simpson Pinched
our King, and Roger and everyone awakens from the innocent
and Nancy comes out of the WC to prevent a full-scale row
between her oldest and youngest girls on Boxing Day.   

Sooper dooper Sad ending to part I
TF