VLVL Rex Snuvvle

[Terrance]

We agree that Rex is easily manipulated. 
His ideology (his revolutionary ideology, 229.31-230.2) and his
fanaticism are the targets of the harshest satire in the novel. He
doesn't know shit about what's going on outside of his small world where
typewriters are clacking deep into the night. Rex turns from one extreme
to another extreme. Bad mother fucker. Novel after novel Pynchon says,
Never trust a man like Rex no matter his ideology, he's a zealot and
sooner or later he's gonna get himself or someone dead. Rex will kill,
Rex wants to suffer, to be locked up, to be tortured, he's a fanatic, a
zealot, a madman. Pynchon has been satirizing extremists for his entire
career. He began doing so in the novel V. That's one reason why I
contend that the Playboy crap contradicts everything he's ever written.
Pynchon never says American needs an enemy. That's Radical Left BS. 
 

jbor wrote:
> 
> on 12/2/04 7:07 AM, Terrance wrote:
> 
> > Rex is a fanatical fool and he's stupid to give BAAD his car. He has sex
> > with his car, names it Bruno. He  gives it up because he's a a
> > masochistic radical. Pynchon puts a rod through Rex and roasts him on a
> > pit of satire. Frenesi approves of his giving up the car. She tells him
> > he did the right thing. It easy enough to conclude from this alone that
> > Rex did the wrong thing. But he also kills Weed. He wants to kill
> > Frenesi. He's easily manipulated out of his car not because he has
> > beliefs or because he holds true, but because he a fanatic. And he's off
> > to join what, exactly? Rex would be better off if he got out of the
> > college world, maybe put down all that political stuff and read On The
> > Road, Zen & the Art of Porsche Maintenance, get comfortable in his own
> > skin again, but he's a guilty white boy. Pynchon is satirizing all the
> > white intellectuals who went to North Vietnam, Cuba, so on.
> 
> I couldn't disagree more. Rex is easily manipulated, I agree, but it's not
> his ideological convictions which are satirised. I think you're overlooking
> the "before" and "after" sequence of events which the chapter presents.
> Early on, before Frenesi takes the gun, she thinks she still has some
> control over what will happen, that she might be able to influence Brock
> (even if she's only kidding herself). After she takes the gun it's game
> over. Conversations and events which occur before that pivotal moment have a
> different texture and tenor to those which occur after.
> 
> best