VLVL2 (15): Happy Ending?

[pynchonoid]

The ending shows an extended, multi-generational
California family reunion, complete with spouses and
children from previous and current marriages, heir to
all the small satisfactions and irritations any family
encounters in addition to a history of dramatic,
life-changing experiences. That this family is able to
gather and celebrate its continuity with the past and
dare to express hope for the future seems to me a
"happy" outcome, given the assault on the family by
Brock Vond & co. over the previous quarter-century.  A
candle in the windy dark, but light nonetheless.

"totally familied out" (374)

Maybe jbor's never been to a family reunion.  You
don't need any particular issues at all in order to
want a break from the family action now and again.

jbor:
>yearning for Brock
> Vond to come back and whisk her away from it all
> (384)

As usual, jbor suppresses the part of Pynchon's text
that undercuts the point he's trying to make. The
narrator, if not jbor, gives the reader Prairie
"suspecting already that he was no longer available,
that the midnight summoning would go safely
unanswered" (384); she's safe to bait and tease her
family's mortal enemy, and to test -- in the privacy
and security of her own fantasy -- her ability to
withstand the unconscious fascist appeals that plagued
her mother and grandmother:  "her promises grew more
extravagant as she drifted into the lucid thin layer
of waking dreaming, her flirting more obvious".  But,
even as she fantasizes, she keeps her guard up enough
to "wake, alert to some step in the woods, some brief
bloom of light in the sky" -- no way she's going to
let Brock get her the way he got her mother.

The redtail hawk (385) may represent some sort of
distant threat from above -- although hawks do not
hunt humans.  That Desmond has eaten blue jays (which
on the novel's first page are associated with carrier
pigeons trying to get a message to Zoyd) may indicate
that Zoyd and family still haven't gotten the message,
and may never get the message. 


	
		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
http://messenger.yahoo.com/