Profit & Loss

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy
--- Teufelsdröckh <florentius at mac.com> wrote: 
> Slothrop's trajectory is from intelligence agent specially selected
> to
> learn about the rocket to fall away from Them to salvation among the
> preterite.

IMO you misread Slothrop's position: he is not an agent, he is a
more-or-less unconcious instrument *in the hands of* agents.  He begins
in a state of ignorance, rises through levels of comprehension as he
sees/assembles his paranoic view of a structured world -- eventually
this view expands beyond the point at which it can center upon himself
and then collapses, Slothrop with it.  He dissipates into nothingness,
weeping at trees, as the structure he once almost understood continues
to grow, invisible and monstrous above the clouds (as it were).
Slothrop is never "saved", he collapses into idiocy.  If you would find
him living on after the War search low, not high -- among the
institutionalized. Perhaps the Fool was captured on film, singing his
nitwit tune in the Titticut Follies. 

Pynchon's picture is bleak. His sympathies seem to me to lie with the
powerless not because their weakness is a moral good but because the
powerless can do less harm, on balance, than the powerful.

Mark

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