VLVL Pynchon's participatory narration

[Terrance]

> >
> > Note the way this passage is filtered through
> > Frenesi's viewpoint: these are her intuitions and
> > attitudes, her biases, exaggerated seemingly to the
> > point of self-conscious parody on her part, and they
> > ultimately reflect on her as much they do
> > on "working cops" or the _TV Guide_, if not more so.
> 
> Not "filtered" so much as perhaps, I don't know,
> participating in it for the time being.  There's taht
> sort of swerving viewpoint thing Pynchon does that
> reminds me, say, these days, of that long,
> bobbing-in-and-out-of-the-water shot in Boogie Nights
> (1997).  

Filtered. Participating. It's a form of  characterization. 

Characterization: methods of revealing the personality of fictional
characters; can be direct characterization, where the narrator makes
direct statements about the character or indirect characterization,
where the personality of the fictional character is revealed through
events in the story. 

Once we recognize it as Characterization, Robert's explanation makes
sense. 

Monroe's explanation simply states the obvious: the vibe of the novel is
... Thoreen ... the Tube ...  consent, acquiescence ... police state. 


That passage is actually a nifty little bit
> of media criticism, and one in sympathetic vibration
> with the overall vibe of the novel.  That "right wing
> weekly" might represent the culmination of Frenesi's
> particular left-wing, even at this late date, rhetoric
> on the matter there, but one can hardly call Vineland
> a novel relishing the prospect of an apparently
> forthcoming, if not already established, police state,
> although it certainly does anticipate, identify the
> ways in which one might establish/has established
> itself, by 1984, by 1990, whenever, with the, if not
> consent, acquiescence--quiescence, at any rate--of its
> subjects.  "Nobody thought it was peculiar anymore."