"The Evacuation still proceeds..." GR Part 1 Section 1

[jbor at bigpond.com]

> As others have said I think that what the screaming is is quite 
> important. Literally speaking, I think it's the sound that wakes 
> Pirate up, most probably the air raid siren warning Londoners of the 
> "Incoming mail" rocket from Katje. Yes, there's a rocket, and yes, in 
> all likelihood there's a siren. I think we can infer that. Why not? 
> There's specific content there in the narrative and specific 
> historical information that we can use to make these interpretations. 
> But there are of course also other thematic and symbolic connotations 
> to the sound, which accumulate as we read on, and again ("a 
> progressive *knotting into*") -- but I don't think it's such a stretch 
> or contradiction to suggest that Pirate's subconscious has 
> incorporated the actual sound into the dream (I'm sure everyone has 
> had a similar alarm clock or ringing telephone experience) and it has 
> set off this incredibly detailed and resonant scenario, which might 
> have any number of referents, keeping in mind both Pirate's peculiar 
> talent and the way that dreams are generated. And, going a step 
> further, why not the idea that Pirate is dreaming "our" dreams -- 
> postmodernist novel that this one most certainly is -- and "our" 
> dreams back in those Cold War 1960s and early '70s would have been 
> very much haunted by the prospect of nuclear apocalypse.

In this there's also a nice symmetry to the novel I think. In the 
opening sequence we have Pirate dreaming a dream which seeps out from 
the narrative timeframe to resonate with the reader's own nightmares 
about nuclear devastation, and then at the end of the novel we have 
another character, Slothrop, who is "dispersed" into the "real world" 
of the reader. (Not to mention the very last sections with Gottfried in 
*that* rocket which eventually "reaches its last unmeasurable gap above 
the roof of this old theatre" where we sit waiting -- and NB "but it's 
all theatre" on p. 3 -- which loops us right back to the first sentence 
of the novel and its "screaming ... across the sky".)

But it might be an idea to consider the waking part of the opening 
section, with its mix of scene setting, slapstick and characterisation. 
It's much more straightforward and realistic than what precedes it, and 
it does fill in quite a bit of information about the dream sequence.

best