VV (20) The Xebec

[jbor]

on 7/17/01 12:47 PM, Samuel Moyer at smoyer at satx.rr.com wrote:

> Trying to follow the narrator in this novel can be tricky, at least for a
> novice like myself.  What about in chapters 1, 2, etc... though, is this the
> same narrator as the Epilogue?

I think the tone and focus is different in the chapters where we follow the
exploits of Benny and the WSC. The Epilogue has the same historical or
historicist cast to it as the chapters which Herbert S. narrates, but I'm
probably 100% sure that it's not him. Nominating it as an "epilogue"
highlights its extraneity to the rest of the text.

> Pynchon's favorite chapter.  I think it goes
> well at the end.  I just went back to see which is my favorite chapter...
> can't decide... liked Fausto's confession, but I also like the aligator
> chase which ends with Stencil being shot.  And the list goes on.
> 
> When is Victoria likely to be pregnant?  Florence right?  I need time...
> this novel is not for working fathers...

Sleeping on it, when Sidney S. thinks "His father. Ha." to himself right at
the end there it could be self-contempt for his lack of fatherly attention
to his son over the years rather than a doubt about young Herbert's
paternity. I'm not sure, though. The two paragraphs before this tell us that
Herbert would be 18, which makes him born sometime after June 1900 -- and
perhaps 1901 -- and imply that Victoria W. accompanied Sidney S. back to
England for a time as, perhaps, a de facto wife of sorts, but that she was
unfaithful to him there (if not also in Florence). I think there is irony
beyond that which Sidney S. admits to himself in this Epilogue.

best