Tyrone

[jbor]

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>From: 
>

> Yes, he's certainly a tyro. Here's another thought on the subject, and I
> may be way off-base but it strikes me that Tyrone used be thought of as
> a common African-American name (like, if you were writing in 60' and
> 70's USA and wrote a stereotyped character of African descent you'd
> lazily call him Tyrone). In Gravity's Rainbow, Slothrop is ostensibly
> being used to find the Schwarzkommando, that black presence in the white
> war, because of a misperceived racist reflex. (Slothrop to his credit
> seems able to separate cartoon-shaped life from real humanity, and so
> Their project fails as Tyrone saves the Schwarzkommando from Them.) What
> I mean to say is, that name may acknowledge that Slothrop is not a
> purely "white" character.

Though there is that Tyrone Power, of course. But, indeed; and I've noted
before that that ubiquitous Slothropian self-address tag -- eg "On the beam,
Jackson" (284) and "Nonono come *on*, Jackson, quit fooling, you got to
*concentrate* . . . . " (561) -- is a generic African-American colloquialism
or apostrophe. I think that, all Ivy League and Puritan forebears and ball
of submerged and seething racial fears (i.e. down the toilet) that he is,
Slothrop *is* as "white" as "white" can be. But, what is being pointed out
to him -- and through him to us -- in the Bildungsroman Pynchon has
constructed around him, is that that "white" vs. "non-white" System or
binary structure or mentality is merely a myth, a pretext for division and
Control.

I've always read Slothrop's dispersal from the text of _GR_ and then
subsequent (potential) reconstitution in the *real* world outside the
fictional narrative as a bit like one of those _Star Trek_ transporter beam
tricks, a transmissive gift to the reader should she or he wish to accept
it. Kai put it very nicely I think:

>         sloth is too much part of our lives, so he is saved every moment
>         we feel for him.

best