You never did the Kenosha Kid? Down the toilet

[jbor at bigpond.com]

On 04/09/2005, jbor at bigpond.com wrote:

> Slothrop's sneakier resistance strategy starts to intercede when he 
> makes the decision to plunge down the toilet. Everything up to that 
> point in the interrogation has been a truthful recount of a real 
> incident from Slothrop's youth, but there's a hinge-point there on p. 
> 63 where Slothrop is deciding whether or not to "follow" his harmonica 
> into the toilet (I'm assuming he really did lose it back then in the 
> Roseland Ballroom in the way he describes, but I don't believe he 
> really dived into the toilet to retrieve it. It stayed lost.) The 
> repeated question -- "Follow?" -- interrupts the flow of the account, 
> and there's a deal of equivocation and sidetracking on Slothrop's part 
> right at this point. There's a decision to be made, both back there in 
> the toilet, but also in his drugged-out state in the hospital in the 
> present.

But eventually Slothrop does takes the plunge, unleashing deep-seated 
xenophobic, homophobic and racist ("Some of it too must of course be 
Negro shit, but that all looks alike." p. 65) impulses.

Interestingly, the Roseland Ballroom episode is taking place in 1939, 
if we can date it from Bird's improvisations on 'Cherokee' in New York. 
But when, upon arrival at his destination, Slothrop perceives that 
"something else has been terribly *at* this country", and it feels to 
him as if "there is a Pearl Harbor every morning, smashing invisibly 
from the sky" (67), we've jumped into a post-1941 timeframe.

With Slothrop's decision to go with the flow, so to speak, the "real" 
memory induced by the Sodium Amytal has been usurped by a fantasy 
originating from within Slothrop's present-time imagination.

best