Discussion Tip Of The Day

[Mike Weaver]

>This strikes me as Pynchon stepping outside the fiction for a moment to 
>deliver a topical comment, and I presume that to be the voice of the 
>author. I think the verb tenses in the paragraph, which clearly separate 
>the narrative present of the V-Note from "today," the moment the sentence 
>is being written, support that reading.

Now I'm with Don on this one.  There are plenty of statements in GR which 
make best sense to me if taken as Mr P talking directly to his 
readers.  It's an aspect of GR which carries a lot of responsibility for my 
loyalty. Made me feel like I was engaged in an intimate intellectual 
relationship with the author.  The rest of the book serves, among other 
purposes, as elaborations and improvisations on those topical comments.

There is the question asked last year sometime as to who was the narrator 
of GR - Osbie Feel being one proposal.  Is this a p-listrift?  Those who 
ascribe the straight to camera statements to Mr P and those who favour a 
fictional narrator.

That heresy aside, another pertinent question is - which statements?  Which 
are clearly the narrator and which might be?