Blicero

[jbor]

I've been quoting selected excerpts from Molly Hite's excellent study 
entitled _Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon_. Here's another:

      One index of the narrator's protean capacity to enter into the
    motives and desires of the characters is the way that Blicero, the Nazi,
    sadist, sexual pervert, nihilist, and murderer, emerges as disconcert-
    ingly comprehensible and almost tragic. [ ... ]

    By an archetypal and eerily seductive displacement, Blicero translates
    Rilkean self-surrender to filicide, so that in the closing sections
    he plays Abraham to Gottfried's Isaac (pp. 749-50), acting out a
    familiar paradigm of denying human ties in obedience to a seemingly
    irrational higher will. By sacrificing his "son" to the rocket, Blicero
    offers a grisly parody of acceptance. This "acceptance" is really a
    repudiation of his own involvement in the natural cycle, "this cycle
    of infection and death" (p. 724), and in a moment of dreadful sincerity
    he tells Gottfried that his horror of his own mortality prompts him to
    make a burnt offering of the younger man [ ... here she quotes the
    passage from p. 723 of the novel beginning "oh Gottfried of course yes
    you are beautiful to me..." ] In this moment, when Blicero reveals that
    his infatuation with the rocket's version of the providential trajectory
    stems from jealousy and self-loathing, he is disturbingly sympathetic.
    It is not only his honesty that is unsettling; it is also the
    implication that allegiance to any of the totalizing "structures
    favoring death" arises from such quintessentially human motives.
                                                [pp. 147-8]

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