VLVL: What troubles Zoyd's sleep? (Was Why Hawaii and Summative Thoughts)

[gumbo at fuse.net]

Rob:

He's been
receiving
> welfare payments under false pretences for 13 or so years, he's been in
> partnership for as long or longer with guys like Van Meter who are in
> cahoots with the Mafia and on the take from just about everyone and
anyone,
> he's a hopeless jerk with women and he dates schoolgirls (54), and he does
> business with shady characters like "RC", Blood and Vato, at least one of
> whom was working for the Vietcong while serving in Vietnam. At the meeting  [etc.]

Me:

I'm not sure where the moral yardstick that's being used here to measure Zoyd comes from, but I don't think it's in the text. 

Of the characters we've met so far, only Hector has much of anything to say to Zoyd about the way he conducts his life, and Hector's motives and perspective are both worth examining. A narc, a putative filmmaker, and a boy with a media consumption problem, Hector's not exactly a beacon of mental health himself. In the course of their 15 or so years of acquaintance, Hector's efforts to help Zoyd have included persistently trying to turn him into a snitch and framing him in a massive dope bust.

If you look again at the catalogue of Zoyd's failings, I think you'll find that most of them--certainly the monthly disability check and his screwed-up love life--can be directly traced to the actions of Brock Vond and Company. If Zoyd sleeps uneasily it's because of BV's malevolence, not because of his own conscience.

(Btw, I read the Blood and Vato history a little differently. I assumed they were in a business partnership with the Viet Cong, in the grand Pynchonian tradition of wartime commerce, as part of their involvement in Gorman Flaff's "legendary operations in money orders and piastres." (182) Which is not the same thing as working *for* them, or giving them information, as was suggested in another post a while back.)

Don