Don't let that evening sun go down

[Terrance Flaherty]

What happened? We had a MDDM going. We skipped 40 chapters and followed
Doug right off a cliff. Not only did we skip the chapters from where we
were in our schedule to the whip chapter we never disused the whip scene
as it is situated in its own chapter and in the novel overall. What
else? Oh, we skipped, not one, but twelve discussions (at least and I
will gladly provide the pages if ya'll are interested, but it will
certainly alter the discussion here, sending the MDDM off the cliff for
good I suspect) of Dixon's apparent
Quaker-pacifism/bravery/anti-governmet/anti-war/etc...

I'm rather surprised these have not been introduced to the discussion.
I'm surprised that we are discussing this chapter at all since we did
have a schedule and we were moving along OK. I'm surprised because I've
read this all before, not once but twice. That's right, this has been
discussed at great length and in as much detail twice before. 
Doug is kicking Jbor's butt this time around but not because he has a
good argument but because Jbor (uncharacteristically I might add) is not
sticking to the text. Maybe Jbor has his mind on other matters. Like
chapter 45 or something? WHo knows. Ya'll got bogged down because the
entire scene can't be isolated from the text, the character reduced to
some ideological cut out, the entire scene run through a dictionary and
analyzed with a computer. 

My own reading agrees with David Morris. It's one of the grandest gags
going in the novel and it begins on the seahorse. If you read all twelve
of the passages I note above I think you will agree that Dixon is not a
pacifist (although he is against war and government) and that Dixon and
RC have played with this all the way through the novel and  the Whip
scene is only the climax, the punch (well only a Quaker Punch) Line.