unreliable?

[Burns, Erik]

Foax:

Otto wrote ...

>unreliable narrators etc.

This is a bit of cloth I've been worrying for awhile and I fear there's a
big something in my mental blind spot. Question: are there unreliable
narrators in Pynchon's work? (Is there unreliable narration?) I can't think
of any, but as I say I may be overlooking an elephant. Seems to me his
narrator is always omniscent (though hardly omnipotent - indeed, often
om-impotent) and certainly paranoid, but not unreliable (and certainly not
to a Kinbotian or Humbertian extreme).

That said, I've had another thought about PFPF: is there value in looking at
VN/TRP from a US/Europe persepective? Seems to me VN (esp. in _Lolita_ and
_Pale Fire_) is actively a displaced European writing about America. TRP
(esp. in _V._ and _Gravity's Rainbow_) seems an American actively writing
about Europe. That they are both at least tangentially "royalty" (VN's
czarist biography, TRP's Mayflower creds) obviously influences their work
from this perspective as well. Interestingly, they both then seem to return
to the homeland (heh.) in later work - _Ada_ being set in VN's Czarist
Russian replacement, Zembla (if memory speaks rightly - though I think the
family actually *lives* in the US, their mental lives are back home), while
_The Crying of Lot 49_ and _Vineland_ are set like gemstones in America.
(_Mason & Dixon_, again, is a blend, but obviously a westward-moving book,
not eastward.)

Maybe there's something in comparing Kinbote to Slothrop. Kinbote, a
paranoid exile, does what he does (no spoilers!) while Slothrop, a paranoid
exile, err, dons a pig's head and purple cape and becomes Rocket Man
carrying dope across The Zone. If you buy the idea, you could stretch it to
say (loosely, loosely) that Kinbote's like VN (coming to America, hunkering
down in academe, translating & annotating _Eugene Onegin_ &c.), while
Slothrop's like TRP (in the Navy, off to sail the seven seas). The
counterbalance of academe vs. action being the one between Europe & America,
by that reading, not just the amateurish (I happily admit) and mostly
uninteresting (I happily aver) mapping of writer onto character.

dunno what can be gotten out of that. just a thought. or three, I guess.

etb