Dixon's Humanity

[Terrance]

             Perhaps the most satisfying quality of Mason & Dixon
             is the manner in which it goes beyond Gravity's Rainbow,
             the work to which it must be compared. Pynchon's early
             work was brilliant, it was dazzling--it was artifice. Mason
             & Dixon is those things, but it is also wise. There is a
             humanity invested in these characters, in this novel, that
             you do not get to see too often, and that I had never seen
             in Pynchon before. This novel is not just about our world,
             our history, our culture. It is about us, about the way we
             live and think and probably always will. The greatest evil
in
             this book is not Entropy, it is slavery; the most heroic
             moment in the book is not the completion of the Line, it is
             Dixon, on the way back, after failing in his mission,
striking
             down a slave trader in a dirty street: 

                 Here in Maryland, they had a choice at last,
                 and Dixon chose to act, and Mason not
                 to,--unless he had to,--what each of us
                 wishes he might have the unthinking Grace to
                 do, yet fails to do. To act for all those of us
                 who have so fail'd.22

             Pynchon's greatness as a writer may rest in his sheer
             ability, at even the most irrelevant moments, to
             communicate so much in an image or sentence that your
             jaw simply drops open. But what makes this the greatest
             of Pynchon's works is its overwhelming humanity, its
             compassion for the good, foolish, weak, and occasionally
             valiant human race. For the first time....


http://www.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/siegel24.htm