THEY 1 of 10

[Terrance]

"The Jesuits taught me to examine things for second meanings
and deeper connections...This implies they were thinking
target all along." 

					Delillo, Underworld



According to Pynchon  there is a drive within us to
establish systems at the expense of differentiation. He has
it, and we have it, and They have it. As a writer he wants
to expand the reader's point of view. He writes  an
encyclopedic satire elaborately designed but he subverts his
own design. There is a sustained tension in Pynchon's texts.
We might call it the "PoMo-Mo Agon." Modernist conventions
and subversive Postmodernist techniques coexist without
invalidating each other so that if the subversive PoMO
really subverts, in the end it subverts the law of
contradiction. One of the important elements of Menippean
Satire is Carnival. One function of the Carnival in GR is to
cast-off what is according to Pynchon, a natural disposition
of the Modern Western Mind, that "A is B and A is not B
cannot both be true. According to Pynchon, the drive to
establish systems at the expense of the other(s) or
differentiation, on the social level, and we can say, on the
aesthetic level, leads to repressive technocratic society
and an art that is only one tool of the repressive system. 

The "Counterforce and the "System" also exist in conflict
and nearly every relationship and every environment in GR
obeys a S&M pattern.  "We define each other." Even the
narrators play parts in the S&M drama, both with an imagined
reader (see naratee and the 2nd person McHale stuff), the
characters, each other, the author, and the reader.
Sometimes they are dominant and sometimes they play victim
to the naratee or another narrator or character, or even
their own stories. .  Some of the narrators work for Them,
are henchmen or masters in the "system" and they will quite
frequently address an imagined reader, mislead him (I think
he is male?) or tell him lies or tell tall tales, or tell
ridiculous paranoid parodies, or give bad advise, or insult,
or mock the reader's "bookish" reflexes and natural
proclivity for patterns and systems and, well,  "cause and
effect." Diversity is reduced to Binarity. 

"Ideas of the opposite"
pleasure from pain, light from dark,
dominance from submission
life from death and guilt from
innocense
GR.48

We also have, in addition to the "YOU" that is addressed in
GR, the "WE" that is addresses, and this "We-Address" often
makes the naratee and the narrators accomplices or
supporters of the Masters or Henchmen or System or a
defender of  character that has been a victim at some point
but is now a victimizer.