VLVL2 (15): Happy Ending?

[Tim Strzechowski]

This topic was brought up earlier, but I thought I'd revisit the topic and recap what's been said to see if anyone else has further input on it:  Does Vineland offer readers a happy ending?


Umberto says:

> Happy ending? In Vineland? Just because Brock Vond is taken to the land of the dead? What's happy in that ending?

pynchonoid states:

> I'm happy to see BV get his, but that's not the end of the novel, it continues a bit beyond BV's demise.

> Whether the actual end of the novel is happy or otherwise is open to interpretation.


jbor offers the following:

And not only is the notion that the novel has a "big Happy Ending" questionable at best, where's there any evidence of Frenesi's "rehabilitation"? Prairie's reunion with her mother is a let-down for the girl (375.6-18), and it seems to be the spur for her escape, "totally familied out" (374), into the "solitude" (375) of the forest, yearning for Brock Vond to come back and whisk her away from it all (384).

It's noteworthy that Prairie tells Zoyd that meeting Frenesi was "like meeting a celebrity" (375) which, as well as referring to the mediated relationship she has had with her -- to Prairie, Frenesi "had been a girl in a movie" (367) -- intimates that maybe Frenesi will end up doing Hector's big anti-drug movie after all. Symbolically-speaking, Hector and Frenesi's dance (350) seems to have sealed a contract of some sort.


Do the final paragraphs offer resolution?  Any sort of "happy" ending?
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