Chasing ... Cutting

[Dave Monroe]

... all I can say is, I've surveyed a half-dozen or so readers so far
(imagine being approached on the street, at work, wherever, by some guy
asking, "would you take a moment to read this Passage, this Book?"
Should have had a white shirt, black tie ...), most unfamiliar with
Gravity's Rainbow, but one at least having a heavily annotated first
edition (hey, he was young ...).  Without any prompting on my part,
everybody I've foisted those first couple of pages on have commented
immediately on how much like a concentration camp that description was,
even down to that "Ss."  And the guy who'd actually read the book was
floored as well by that little epiphany--neither of us had noticed it,
and he hadn't even had it pointed out to him.  All these allusions (and
not only to the Holocaust, of course) only add to the complexity, the
density of the text, and thus to the interest it might continue to
elicit, the interpretations it might yet provoke.  And it's all in there
...

Terrance Flaherty wrote:

> Sure, both/and, but Moby-Dick is not a tale told by idiot about a
> little girl that feel down a rabbits hole with her cousin Hamlet.