"Morality" in *GR*

[Doug Millison]

Slothrop and Pokler each encounter the Other, yeah, I like rj's 
imaginative and poetic interpretation. But while it may ignore it can 
hardly erase the judgement the novel renders with regard to Pokler 
(and, by extension, to those responsible for the exploitation of 
slave labor in the Nazi war effort).  Slothrop and Pokler are both 
victims of systems, victims of Them,  but their actions in the novel, 
and the consequences of their actions, are obviously quite different. 
Slothrop's fate is ambiguous (he ceases to function as a character in 
the novel); Pokler's less so, he continues to exist as a character, 
fully aware of the extent of his guilt.

If anything, Slothrop's dance with the girl (hardly a marriage; she 
wears her first communion dress; she evaporates 150 pages and many 
episodes before Pokler puts his wedding ring on the hand of the 
"random woman" in Dora) serves to highlight the Nazi war crimes for 
which Pokler will come to realize he is partially responsible.  The 
girl's doll's hair "belonged to a Russian Jewess" and its burning in 
the fire (282) recalls the Nazi fires that consumed so many Jews. 
Like the doll, the Dora slaves were reduced to objects to be 
manipulated in the creation and production of the rocket, to feed the 
furnaces of the war effort.

Comparing Slothrop and Pokler is fruitful.  Slothrop's journey of 
discovery leads to enigma, fragmentation.  Pokler's leads to Dora 
where he finally admits what he's known but denied for some time: 
"He knew about Nordhausen and the Dora camp:  he could see -- the 
starved bodies, the eyes of the foreign prisoners [....] He had 
known, too, all along, that Ilse was living in a re-education camp 
[....] he could finally put the two data together " (428); Pokler 
comes to this understanding well before he goes into Dora and, 
finally, sees at first-hand  the crime he's been a part of  -- one of 
the crimes that, presumably, will be prosecuted in the War Crimes 
Tribunal at Nurnberg we hear about in the Low Frequency Listener 
passage.  Pokler knows evil when he sees it, he now clearly sees his 
own part in it, and, "Later, in the Zone" we are told, his "guilt 
will become a sensual thing" (428).
-- 

d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>