P's Mothers & The Fatal Weakness (Flaw) GR.738

[Terrance]

"What is "Slothrop's own gift and Fatal Flaw"? (676)

Maybe we should stick together part o' the way, and
Skies'll be bright-er some day!
Now everybody--  (GR.677) 

But they can't. 

The fatal flaw (a term Pynchon took from Norman O. Brown's reading of
Freud) is 
a division  within the divided self (the  FF of the Fatal Flaw or
Weakness is personified as the Floundering four, each with their own
gift/ flaw  deep in the heart Freudian spirit or mind of Modern man. 

And, although Pynchon says this Oedipal condition and this division  is
40 years in the making (the Nazis), the division is much older. 

The fathers have no power today and
never did, but because 40 years ago we could not kill them,
we are condemned now to the same passivity, the same
masochist fantasies THEY cherished in secret, and worse, we
are condemned in our weakness to impersonate men of power
our own infant children must hate, and wish to usurp the
place of, and fail..  738

In P's novels this division is also metaphysical/philosophical and
ultimately religious, it  can be traced in his fiction to the Jesuit
trained philosopher, Desecrate,  and to 
Colonialism. 

"Perhaps British colonialism has produced a new sort of
being, a duel man, aimed two ways at once..." --V.