Hors d'Oeuvres For Hire

[Terrance]

s~Z wrote:
> 
> Dixon makes this straightforward announcement and explanation of
> his pacifist stance, when challenged to
> fight:
> 
> "Did they tell You I was a Quaker, Sir, and would not fight?"
> ____________________________________
> 
> This is no announcement and explanation. It is a question! Dixon
> is wondering if Fabian had been told this. Then read down a few
> more lines and read Dixon's thoughts. " -- if so, they are
> quizzing with you, Sir, -- in fact I am a Transported Felon of the
> most Desperate Stripe, to whom, in the great Feast of Sin, Murder
> is but an Hors d'Oeuvre...?"
> 
> Not exactly Gandhi.

No, Dixon is nothing straightforward, he is full of ironies and twists
and ambiguities. A wonderful creation. Pynchon, I think, rose to the
challenge and created very human and rounded out characters in Dixon and
Mason. Mason, not having me too many Quakers, assumes that Quakers are
against war, but he is wrong about that. He assumes that Dixon is a
Quaker-Pacifist, but he wrong about that too. Mason can't quite figure
him out, his red coat, he Quakerism, his temper, his drinking, his
appetite, his lust, his stories, his matinees, his half-way to a Hindoo
silence, his work....but (and the reason I love this novel is because I
read this novel as a novel about work--writers, carpenters, surveyors,
farmers, merchants, sailors, astronomers, union labor history) as they
work together they come to know the other better. It's one of the great
ironies. Who are we working for? Maybe we work for THEM and maybe we
work for US. And maybe, just maybe, I'm full of shit too.