Dixon's Transformation & Farina's Wolf Story

[Terrance]

http://www.richardandmimi.com/beendown.html

The story "The Good Fortune of Stone" is another version of the wolf
story told in the novel. Pynchon states in his 1983 introduction to the
novel that Fariña told this story many times. The near-death experience
recounted in both versions of the wolf story must have touched him
profoundly, and this, combined with his feeling of guilt (vergogna), may
have given him the conflicting impulses of a deathwish and a feeling of
exemption, two impulses which, it seems to me, are never entirely
resolved or sorted out from each other in the novel. Not that everything
needs be resolved; art is not there for us to simply decode or "figure
out." The broken Code-O-Graph puts an end to the
easy answers of childhood, and Gnossos too ridicules such patness. When
Pamela says, "Must you be so cryptic?" Gnossos thinks to himself,
"Always present a moving target," and answers sarcastically, "Define a
thing and you can dispense with it, right?" (39) 

But sanity for Gnossos would lie somewhere between the untroubled,
patly-defined life of Gunsmoke junkies and the nervous energy of the
perpetually moving target. Gnossos' deathwish is a yearning for
quiescence, for the quelling of his conscience. The impossibility of
this yearning gives him a contempt for those who have some modicum of
peace in life, those who are "deaf to their own doom." In the song,
"Sell-Out Agitation Waltz," Fariña scorns such people "who ain't aware
that every morning they
wake up dead." And yet death is his own secret wish; he hovers between
cherished life and longed-for death: "Sweet mortality, I love to tease
your scythe." (169) 

Herein lies the protagonist's central conflict. He went in quest of
something Real, but he has found and seen things of such terrifying
reality that he needs to numb himself. He anesthetizes himself through
drugs, through his posture of coolness, through masquerading as
superheroes and other heroic figures of myth and history, and most
significantly through his declaration of Exemption. 



iv.) Exemption 

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_farina.html