VLVL Rex Snuvvle

[Terrance]

> 
> 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.


Rex's volatile fanaticism is satirized from the start.  At first, he is
a graduate students in the SE Asian Studies Department at College of the
Surf. He's a wealthy  ultraconservative student living in an off campus
beach front apartment. He is prone to fanaticism and attracted to
extremes, be they fundamentalist christian and conservative or
revolutionary communist. 


He drives and and has sex with a Porsche. Rex puts his throbbing manhood
down in Bruno's carburetor.  He has christened his Porsche, "Bruno." 
Why Bruno? Is Bruno Brown? Bruno is name for a male, usually a Brown
haired or Brown eyes or Brown male. Rex is obviously a member of the
whole sick crew generation of the 1960s. Rex's blubbering
gesticulations, his fringe bag/purse, the masculine name of his fetish,
all suggest that he is a latent homosexual.   




While being indoctrinated into the government's version of the War in
Vietnam (one of the issues students were most vocal about 1965-1970 was
government/military industrial complex indoctrination of students, but
Rex is a graduate student at Their own polytechnic, not Berkeley or
Columbia)  he
Turns. Despite his own best efforts not to discover the Truth, he
discovers what he believes is the  Truth about the war in Vietnam.


Fearing reprisal, he remains silent, but his
bookish obsession with the war and his fanaticism 
converge when his recondite scholarship turns up an obscure 
group of revolutionaries and he begins corresponding, in paranoid
secretiveness, with what remains of the BLGVN now living in exile in
Paris. In the mind of the fanatical Rex, this group of men and women,
becomes 

"a romantic lost tribe with a failed cause, likely to remain unfound in
earthly form but perhaps available the way Jesus was to those who
"found" him--like a prophetic voice, like a rescue mission from
elsewhere which had briefly entered real history, promising to change
it, raising specific hopes that might then get written down, become
programs, generate earthly sequences of cause and effect. If such an
abstraction could have for a while found residence in this mortal world,
then--of the essence to Rex--one might again...." (Pynchon's ellipsis,
VL.207-208)