MDDM Ch. 72 Dixon and the slave driver (Italics)

[John Bailey]

>From: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
>Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2002 19:25:07 +1100
>
>Further, the lack of a question mark does indicate that it isn't >framed as 
>a question, whatever else Dixon might use question marks >for. Can you find 
>another example in the text where Dixon asks a >question but doesn't use a 
>question mark? And why would he be asking >the slave-driver anything 
>anyway? He's the one calling the shots. It's >rhetorical, not 
>interrogative, imo.
>

I'm no grammar whiz but I've always been interested that the nuts and bolts 
of Pynchon's 'language' are rarely discussed here, mainly because, when I'm 
all said and done, one of the things which first drew me to his books were, 
well, the lovely long sentences. And the way they (usually) still conformed 
to strict grammatical rules. But, of course, he plays.

Since V. at least (I haven't read SL in a long time) Pynchon has presented 
questions without question marks (which of course makes problematic their 
status as questions). I wish I had some examples handy, but there are a 
wealth of them in V. Have a peek. Benny P, especially, engages in this 
practice of...wha. That's wha? without the ?, which I've always found 
disturbing. Can that *be* a statement?

At the same time, Pynchon uses question marks at the end of statements 
(preceded by the ... as someone pointed out) to indicate Dixon's Geordie 
accent, which I personally don't think works that well, but then I wasn't 
raised in the US, so perhaps a question mark inflects differently to my ear. 
Any Northern English reading? How do you read it?

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