Benny's Job

[Dave Monroe]

No doubt there's some sort of dragon resonance here someway, somehow,
Dawn.  Benny Profane as parodic knight?  Parodic knight errant, at
least?  Certainly much of that with Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity's
Rainbow.  The Whole Sick Crew as The Knights of the Round Table or
somesuch?  Among many, many other things, no doubt.  Reminds me, I've
seen the film adaptation, but I've never read Bram Stoker's The Lair of
the White Worm ...

http://www.literature.org/authors/stoker-bram/lair/

Joseph Campbell isn't quite my thing, so I'm not sure how to articulate
his dragons to Pynchon's alligators any more than you have here, but
Benny's confrontations with them do seem not quite what "the society he
lives in" expects of him, no?  Again, that sympathetic sympathy in the
face of the presumed enemy.  Although one might read it as strangely
self-serving, perhaps projecting (and here's where maybe that
Campbellian self-confrontation, overcoming comes in?) a certain
world-weariness, a certain death-wish, even, on his prey, but ...

But there is indeed no particular demonization of those alligators, is
there?  A gator does "turn and attack" (p. 147 in the Harper Perennial
ed.), but, well, woudn't you if you were being hunted?  Hunted,
apparently, merely because they're alligators, big, toothy, and
dangerous at close quarters, no doubt, but just what threat do they pose
to the surface-dwelling humans of Nuevo York?  I think more than one
somebody has mentioned possible psychological readings as well, monsters
in the subconscious or whatever, which again would perhaps resonate with
your speculations.  Let me know ...