M&D or It's about Religion

[Terrance]

If M&D is a novel about Slavery, it must be novel about Dixon. 

http://www.vangoghgallery.com/painting/p_0438.htm

http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/Hero.htm

Pynchon's novels are all "Tales About America" (MD.7) 

They all have an American Hero. 

They are all quest narratives:  in search of  V, not so much what has
been or what could be but what could have been, a fork in the road, a
Prairie, a subjunctive America. 

Dixon is the hero. 

Rubbish tips and sailing ships
coffee stains & French ladies laps
Charting & farting and making maps
Dollies and Jollies and Janes
Dirty boys flinging rocks 
at wind spun weathervanes
making streets and naming rivers
magnetic critters that give one the shivers
and divers and divers of other tithers
paved and hoed
owed and paid
and after all has been done and said
If we had, if we could, if we only did and didn't 
what a wonderful dream it might have been.