GR 'Streets' (death and/or afterlife)

[Paul Mackin]

Comedy Central.


On Sat, 2003-04-19 at 10:41, jbor wrote:
> >> The telling detail is that Pynchon has these "army
> >> chaplains" preaching to the soldiers *before* they go off into battle.
> 
> on 19/4/03 11:47 PM, Paul Mackin wrote:
> 
> > But so what? The reader can't possibly assume the men would just get up
> > from the church service and march off to combat if they hadn't been
> > ordered to do so by their commanders?
> 
> No, but that's not what I said. I've been talking about the way the passage
> has been written. It could have been written in other ways, with generals
> and orders and whatnot, or with burials or baptisms, but it wasn't.
> 
> > The reader doesn't divorce his
> > interpretation from the common sense he has about how things operate in
> > the world. We're not from another planet.
> > 
> > Why do you seem to be granting to chaplains powers they don't have,
> > powers the army has not given them? Powers the Almighty has not given
> > them?
> 
> Wha? The chaplains are "working for the army". They preach, and then they
> send the soldiers off to battle. God speed and all that. Who said anything
> about the chaplains giving the orders? Seems a bit of a straw man,
> particularly if you didn't want to prolong the topic.
> 
> >> Not
> >> ministering to the sick and wounded, performing last rites, delivering
> >> eulogies.
> > 
> > Huh? The men aren't dead or wounded yet.
> 
> They are "dead now" (693.9), as well as "going to die" (693.13). Common
> sense also dictates that the chaplains would be doing all these other
> things, and that Pynchon had the opportunity to describe the scene however
> he wanted to. He chose to depict the chaplains preaching to the soldiers
> before they went off and were killed in battle.
> 
> >> Sending them off to their deaths with promises of redemption and
> >> salvation. "It really happened." (693.14)
> > 
> > "Sending them off to their deaths" is not a paraphrase of anything in
> > the text. 
> 
> Yes, it is. The soldiers "went out". The chaplains didn't. "Off you go,
> boys. God speed." Sentiments to that effect. And then "some died before they
> got back inside a garrison-church again."
> 
> best
>