GRGR - Banana breakfast

[Tim Strzechowski]

I like the contrasts Pynchon establishes through the use of these bananas.
While there is darkness, death, and destruction and going on around them,
the men are awakening to the sunrise and the "war morning's banana
fragrance" (10).  If we are to assume that the opening paragraph of the
chapter (pp. 7 - 8) is from Pirate's POV, he even seems to think of the
bananas as something with which he "would coat all the booze-corroded
stomachs of England" (8).  Here, the bananas -- although visually equated to
the Rocket and the Phallus -- become significant as a result of what they
offer the weary soldiers in this scene: humor (slipping on peels, comic
props), community (as they fall over themselves and gather at the table to
feast on the array of Pirate's banana dishes), and perhaps even Hope (e.g.,
"there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol
and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating,
surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight [...]").

I suppose I don't read the banana scene quite the same way kelber does.
Whereas the novel opens with a screaming rocket and nightmares and the
Dantean vision of the Evacuees, the second chapter develops the banana image
into a counterpoint to that which the opening Rocket nuances convey.  It is
only when "the phone call [...] rips easily across the room" (10) -- like
that screaming across the sky -- that Pirate (and we) are yanked back to the
reality of the War.

Tim





>
> On Nov 2, 2005, at 11:04 AM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
>
>> The banana breakfast, with its impossible litany of foods prepared by
>> Pirate, is a signal that the hoped-for reality (waking from the dream)
>> isn't going to materialize.  Pirate's desperate attempt to counterpose a
>> humanized phallus (banana as comfort food) against the rocket phallus?
>> The banana breakfast resistance includes American/Belgian waffles,
>> bananas molded into the British lion, bananas flambe and, most
>> noticeably, Jewish kreplach -- a culinary missle counterattack.
>>
>
>