You never did the Kenosha Kid?

[jbor at bigpond.com]

> On 31/08/2005, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
>
>> Willfully obfuscatory mindgame as in "Hey, they're trying to 
>> experiment on me, so I'm going to subvert the experiment."  Probably 
>> not.  Willfully obfuscatory mindgame as in "Hey, I'm about to be put 
>> under.  I wonder how long I can force myself to stay awake?"  
>> Possibly.  I've  tried this the handful of times I've been 
>> anesthetized (kind of wish it would happen more often.  Today, for 
>> instance.)
>
> There's still the issue of whether Slothrop is asleep or awake before 
> "the doctor leans in [...] to wake him". If he's awake and only 
> pretending to be asleep, which seems to be the case (his "awareness", 
> the numerical itemised points and subpoints both before and after the 
> supposed waking etc), then it's clear that he is deceiving the 
> doctors, on that score at least.

And also note Pointsman's subsequent recap of the experiment results:

	"You've seen his MMPI. His F Scale? Falsifications. Distorted thought
	processes. . . . The scores show it clearly: he's psychopathically 
deviant,
	obsessive, a latent paranoiac [...]" (90)

Pointsman's assessment of what Slothrop was doing is right on the 
money, I'd say.

While I agree that Slothrop is actively resisting the effect of the 
drug, I'm not convinced that the point of the Sodium Amytal injection 
is to put Slothrop to "sleep", or that that's what happens when one is 
under the drug's influence. It's a "truth serum", isn't it? He's 
resisting the intended effect of the drug -- that much is clear -- but 
I don't agree that the intended effect is to put him to sleep. It's 
pretty obviously an interrogation.

best

> And I guess the other question to ask is, why does Slothrop's 
> recollection of the incident in the Roseland Ballroom (to all accounts 
> and purposes a fairly "truthful" and realistic account) gradually 
> degenerate into a surrealistic parody of a pulp Western story (like 
> Parkhill's 'The Kenosha Kid'). One possible answer to this question is 
> that Slothrop's mindgame or interference strategy has worked.
>
> I like the "Kute Korrespondences" ... correspondence. I also think 
> that a connection can be made to Slothrop's character's eventual 
> disintegration or dispersal in the text, where he seemingly moves from 
> the "fictional" world into the reader's "real" world, which is pretty 
> similar to what he's doing (or trying to do) with 'The Kenosha Kid' 
> story back in St Veronica's.
>
> There's also Slothrop's fave comic book superhero, "four color 
> Plasticman" (206-7), and "Sundial"", with whom Slothrop is identified 
> in the text. Note also Sundial's special superhero talent:
>
> ( [...] The name of the hero, or being, was Sundial. The frames never 
> enclosed him -- or it -- for long enough to tell. Sundial, flashing 
> in, flashing out again, came from "across the wind", by which readers 
> understood "across some flow, more or less sheet or vertical: a wall 
> in constant motion" -- over there was a different world where Sundial 
> took care of business they would never understand.)" (472)