VLVL2 and NPPF: The Nature of Reality (part 2)

[Don Corathers]

I don't think two novels could be much different in terms of narrative reliability.

In Pale Fire we are completely at sea. Each word in the book might have been written, edited, planted, manipulated, colored or at least shaded by any one of (at least) three candidate narrators. Trust no one.

The correspondence between authority and author is right around a hundred percent in Vineland, imo. The narrator is omniscient but just a little choosy about what he wants to reveal, and when to reveal it. Sometimes, as in "He sure would,"  it suits his purposes to let us know what's *going* to happen. Whatever he says, he's not shitting you.

Don Corathers

 
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Tim Strzechowski 
  To: Pynchon-L 
  Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2003 11:48 PM
  Subject: VLVL2 and NPPF: The Nature of Reality (part 2)


  . . . continuing:


  Furthermore, the narrative consciousness peeks out at the reader at various points in the writing.  For example:

    "Oh, I know there's some heavy-duty hombres, badasses, spend all day narrowly escaping death by tree, not too much patience with anything out of the ordinary, but I've got the element of surprise.  Don't I?"

    "You'll see," weary Slide advised.

    He sure would, but only after ... (p. 5)

  Additionally:

    "It was well into lunchtime when he got to the Log Jam, and he was disappointed to find nobody at all from the media, just a collection of upscale machinery parked in the lot, itself newly blacktopped.  These were the first of several rude updates" (ibid).

  With statements like "He sure would" and "These were the first of several rude updates," the narrative consciousness is laying the groundwork for the reader's making a discovery of some import later in the narrative, a discovery that seems at the moment to be outside the realization of Zoyd himself (at least for the moment).  How does the narrative consciousness know this?  At what point does this story cease to be a story in and of itself, and become a story as told sporadically from an omniscience?  Since the "rude updates" are eventually learned by Zoyd and the reader, one may surmise that this omniscience is to be trusted. Reality, in essence, is being manipulated to the extent that the reader is being given specific details a little at a time by both the characters in the narrative structure *and* the omniscience that permeates that narrative.

  Are there additional ways in which each/both author(s) examine the nature of reality in this work?

  Is this a major theme for the work as a whole?  Is this specific to this work as a piece of Postmodernist fiction?

  Are there differences in the ways each author incorporates this theme into his work?  Are there similarities?





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