"Morality" in *GR*

[jbor]

Millison:

> Brains ravaged 
> by antisocial and mindless pleasures may not know who's on trial for
> which crimes, may not be able to distinguish the guilty from the
> innocent -- back to that pesky morality, judging good and evil, again
> -- but we know because Pynchon already showed us when we followed
> Pokler into Dora and watched him try to make amends for his part in
> the war crimes by taking the wretched prisoner in symbolic marriage
> -- the scene Pokler confronts in Dora could easily come out of those
> Nazi war crime documentary films they played on TV and in school back
> in the '50s and '60s.
snip

Of course, this symbolic marriage scene is twinned with the one which opens
the sequence, as Slothrop takes the "tiny frost-flower" of a hand of the
little Nazi girl (281-3), orphanned and scarred by the rampages of the
escaped Dora prisoners. Slothrop moves "out of the fire's pale" and into
blackness in order to embrace her pain ("He can't even tell if she is
leading"), just as Pokler has to enter the "darkness outside" of his world
of scientific "vacuums" and "labyrinths" in order to embrace the Jewess's
(432-3). Both men have embraced an/the Other; they have suddenly realised
that there are other worlds and other perspectives on the world beyond their
own. They can't rationally experience or empathise with this Other, and her
suffering, can't "know the pain" so to speak, and thus it has to be an
irrational sensation experienced beyond the "light" of reason. Both men are
here beginning to shake off their preconceptions about what is "good" and
what is "evil". What Pokler gives up with his wedding ring are his own hopes
of regaining a happy family setup with Leni and Ilse. Gone are his
self-delusions about himself and his work: he had convinced himself that the
rocket he willingly helped construct would take them to the moon and beyond,
was not an instrument of torture and oppression. What Slothrop has to
(ultimately) give up is "the one ghost-feather his fingers always brush by
... America". (623)