GR 'Streets'

[jbor]

>> At GR.693 Slothrop reads about the Bomb (bottom of page 693). And just
>> prior to the bomb we get, "mightn't we find some way back?"

on 15/4/03 12:08 AM, s~Z at keithsz at concentric.net wrote:
 
> Maybe the trees and snake imagery of the first paragraph aren't being
> stretched too much by suggesting Eden.

I'm not sure that poplars are particularly suggestive of Biblical symbolism
here so much as they are being used to evoke a typical north German
landscape. They lead into the "it could have been" here or there paragraph.

After catching a glimpse of "the row of faces in the bus, drowned-man green,
insomniac, tobacco-starved, scared, not of tomorrow, not yet, but of this
pause in their night-passage ... " (the bus has stopped suddenly and the
passengers have woken), the narrator, or Slothrop, meditates on the scene
and self-poses the rhetorical question about finding "some way back". I
think it's to do with the idea of human "passage", with daily travail, with
the way that *streets* have been used in the war and after, "now
indifferently gray with commerce, with war, with repression", and with
finding "some way back" to a more human/humane life and society. It again
seems to me to be a very secular vision. (Lots of stuff on "The Street" in
_V._ as well, by the way.)

Note also how the central paragraph on p. 693 begins: "Even in a street used
for that ... " Again the narrative voice is using rhetorical emphasis to
mark its attitude (surprise, anger, perhaps even contempt) to what went on
in the garrison-churches and after.

best