Blicero

[jbor]

This is the full paragraph from Molly Hite:

      The fact that the narrator refuses to stand aloof from the characters
    has implications for the value systems of _GR_. The novel deals with
    some of the most horrifying prospects of contemporary life: the rise of
    megalithic international corporations, the corresponding dehumanization
    of twentieth-century society, the immanent purposes of technology, the
    threat of global annihilation. But though the text insists on a
    polarized vision with indelible lines drawn between Us and Them, it does
    not condemn any of its characters. The narrator treats even the most
    villainous characters with such compassion that it becomes impossible to
    regard the novel's world as populated by villains and heroes. A villain
    can stay a villain only if he is regarded from a rigorously "objective"
    standpoint, and this narrator eschews objectivity to such a degree that
    the reader is forced to understand and even sympathize with
    conventionally repellent types like Pointsman and Blicero. In a way,
    such sympathy is more shocking than pronounced antipathy because it
    insists that there is no real They in the final analysis: only Us.
                        (_Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon_,
                            Ohio SU, Columbus, 1983, p. 144)

Her readings of the actual text are very astute.

best


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

> I like this.  It also says of course that Blicero is a figure "of central
> importance in the novel."   Was Faust evil?  I suggest no more so than
> Blicero.  It is an apt comparison.
>
> Blicero is the Sado-Father to Slothop's inept Oedipus.  Neither is evil.
> Both are inevitable and both heroic in their own spheres.