What are these people about?

[Terrance]

> 
> I take your point but I think there are times when the narrative -
> ostensibly within Wicks's tales - shifts totally out of his ken, 

I agree, there are times when another narrator picks up the thread and
runs. 


and that
> it's a bit of a cop-out to say that M & D and their responses and
> realisations at this or that point in the text are only "projections" of
> Wicks's and thus dismiss them. 

Not dismissing them at all. 

( and I take responsibility for not making myself clear, even when this
was deliberate ;-) ). 


I'm not suggesting that their reactions are not honest  outrage and
heartfelt, but only that their extrapolations about America (i.e., what
in the holy names are these people about, America is a sort of Hell,
America--this one is a Puritan POV--is an infected
wilderness...etc...)   and its people are not only false, they are
biased and ethnocentric. Moreover, the text juxtaposes these
ethnocentric views of American Exeptionalism with English historical
events to deliberately calls into question the prism of cultural values
that our boys look through when they judge America and its people. 

(After all, Wicks is only a "projection" of
> Pynchon's in the first place. 

Yes, but Pynchon is not in the text. He is not telling a tale to his
family, a tale in which he figures as character. And we are constantly
reminded that RC is making it up as he goes. In this example, Ives calls
our attention to the discrepancy between the RC tale and the Mason Field
book, but RC goes on anyway, saying **THEY** went together. RC has a
purpose for sending the boys together and then sepertately--Mason going
alone and Dixon going as Mason and I think that his own crisis of faith
is not so separate from either Dixon's or Mason's. 


And there are examples aplenty of the shift
> *beyond* Wicks - an obvious recent one would be when the narrative relates
> events in R.C.'s life at home with Phoebe *after* the time of the
> expedition, and quite probably after the time of Wicks's tale-telling as
> well, at 324-5.) And we've agreed to disagree about Wicks correlation to
> Ishmael I think.

OK. 


> 
> My point is that there are themes and realisations in the text which are at
> odds with (the tale-telling) Wicks's viewpoint. 

Agreed. 

Certainly Wicks
> characterises "young Cherrycoke" within his narratives, and often harshly or
> comically, and he's not a totally unsympathetic character at all. However, I
> don't think he speaks for the text (in the same way that Ishmael does, for
> example). In this instance I can completely understand why Dixon could not
> and did not pray at the site of the massacre. How inappropriate would it
> have been for him to pray to the slaughterers' "God" for the "souls" of the
> slaughtered? I don't think Wicks gets this at all. And no wonder Dixon's own
> faith was shaken to the core at that moment. I think that these are things
> which Wicks does not realise, even as an older man, complacent and certain
> in his own faith, but which the text does take for granted.
> 
> best

I agree almost, but not quite. But we can discuss it as we go....I gotta
go now, 

Thanks so very much, 

T