VLVL Zoyd: good dad or bad dad?

[Tim Strzechowski]

>
> As is the assumption that it was Zoyd who went to the health food store to
> buy the soda, or that it was delivered by magical pixies. Someone went
> there, and of the two I'm willing to assert that it's more likely to have
> been Prairie.

With all due respect, Rob, for as much as you harp on folks to stick to the
text and support their arguments with textual evidence, I find your approach
to this passage surprisingly presumptuous.  Even the magical pixie part . .
.


>
> Isn't the whole Count Chocula, Froot Loops and Cheet-os thing just another
> piece of the picture of how childish/childlike Zoyd really is?
>

Of course.  But consider the choices of breakfast cereals out there: sugar
or hay.  Wheat-based cereal brands (Special K, Nuts and Oats and Cardboard,
etc.) carry connotations of uptight real world foax worried about bowel
movements and colon cancer, i.e. adulthood.  Sugar-based cereals reinforce
the image of childhood, innocence, being care-free, etc., the very thing a
writer like Pynchon would be seeking in his characterization of a Zoyd
Wheeler.  Zoyd's choice of breakfast cereal (as much as it *can* be his
"choice" while being a narrative device of the author's) has no more REAL
bearing on his parenting abilities than it does on ours.

Cheet-os, too.