Source of Pirate's Dream (WAS: Chasing...Cutting)

[jbor]

----------
>From: "David Morris" <fqmorris at hotmail.com>
>

>> > This isn't Pirate having a bad dream that could be interpreted as being
>>about the Holocaust by a clever reader, it's Pirate having a dream that
>>could be interpreted as being about the Holocaust by Pirate.
>>
>>And, which he *doesn't*.
>>
>>Yes. I like this idea very much indeed. The banana breakfast is thus
>>Pirate's own carnal comfort or mindless pleasure, his denial of what he has
>>dreamt/witnessed.
>
> Actually, it would be his denial of what he had _interpreted,_ which is a
> far greater denial!

A refusal to interpret, but a denial of the dream and what he has seen/heard
on his covert missions perhaps . . .

But yes, Pirate is still loyal to "the Firm" and his "comfortable case load"
(32-33) at this time without ever really knowing or questioning to what uses
the data he gathers is being put by S.O.E. I'm wondering now if the Firm
might have made Pirate the go-between between Teddy Bloat and Mexico in
order to bring him into Slothrop's proximity -- thereby widening Their
surveillance program on young Tyrone ("another of the thousand dodgy
intra-Allied surveillance schemes ... [i]n which the German curiously fades
into irrelevance") by including him on Prentice's "case load", without
Pirate's conscious knowledge yet perhaps -- and that maybe that first
paranoid dream which Pirate intercepts is in fact Slothrop's. The sudden
thought Pirate has right at the end of the opening section about how for a
"split second you'd have to feel the very point" of the rocket "strike your
skull" (7) has never seemed to me to be 'in character' for Pirate, but it
does seem to be in line with Slothrop's paranoid obsession "with the idea of
a rocket with his name written on it" (25.8), and in fact seems to complete
the sentence Slothrop speaks to Tantivy about how it "could "happen *any
time*, the next second, right, just suddenly . . . shit . . . just zero,
just nothing . . . and . . . " (25.17)

Another clue would seem to be at 34.4 up:

     . . . and what foreigner is it, exactly, that Pirate has in mind if it
    isn't that stateless lascar across his own mirror-glass, that poorest of
    exiles. . . .

A possibility . . . ?

The opening sequence is one of the few pieces of the puzzle I've never been
able to get my head around, but Kevin's simple reminder about keeping in
mind the general approach to narrative and character Pynchon employs in the
novel has really made it begin to fall into place. Mucho gracias to him. The
Holocaust theory had never really made sense, as Terrance also notes, but
because of the vehemence and hysteria which its suggestion occasioned it
merely served to obfuscate the episode even further, and render calm
consideration and discussion nigh impossible.

best