SLSL Intro, "almost, but not quite me..."

[Mutualcode at aol.com]

             At the heart of the story, most crucial and worrisome,
       is the defective way in which my narrator, almost but not
       quite me, deals with the subject of death. When we speak
       of "seriousness" in fiction ultimately we are talking about
       an attitude toward death...

             In "The Small Rain" characters are found dealing with
       death in pre-adult ways. They evade: sleep late, they seek
       euphemisms. When they do mention death they try to make
       with the jokes. Worst of all, they hook it up with sex... The
       language suddenly gets too fancy to read. Maybe this wasn't
       only my own adolescent nervousness about sex. I think,
       looking back, that there might have been a general
       nervousness in the whole college age subculture. A tendency
       to self-censorship... Even the American soft-core pornography
       available in those days went to absurdly symbolic lengths
       to avoid describing sex. (pp 5-6)

Well alrighty, now. What are we to make of this seemingly honest 
confession of immaturity? "...almost, but not quite me" ? The Intro
Narrator (IN), here, is accepting "the young writer" back into himself-
no third person distancing, but notice that he is protecting more than
criticizing, spreading the blame, as it were, for the avoidance of 
sex/death to the shared constraints of a whole generation, of which 
"he" was merely a member, albeit, struggling to break free from,
and, find his unique, unconstrained, voice.

Okay. I can accept that; there must be some truth to this revision 
of the man's, the writer's youth, excepting for one huge glaring
elephant of a problem, in the parlor, which makes me wonder if the
IN is "almost, but not quite" Pynchon. That would be, not the
avoidance of death and sex in SR, but, The Holocaust in GR, where
the art of avoidance has grown uncomfortably large. 

I don't trust this Intro Narrator, not one drop. I think he's selling
bridges.

respectfully
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