A few scattered notes

[Sterling Clover]

Ok all this talk of revelations promised and never delivered has  
inspired me to come forward with one of my half-formed observations  
inspired by ATD -- the repeated device of presenting characters with  
events whose significance they are only to realize later. i haven't  
made an exact list, but it seems to happen repeatedly (and with equal  
frequency in M&D and GR, in retrospect) -- the most memorable to me  
being the foreshadowing of the dissolution of the love triangle in  
the latter section of the book. Trying to work out if there's  
anything particularly to be gleaned from P's love of the device --  
there's certainly the ominous mood it brings about, and the sense of  
the narrator who always knows more than they tell. But there's a  
particular wistfulness to it, a sense of lost possibilities -- that  
the idea that the characters would only come to understand what was  
happening later is as much in the future-head-voice of the characters  
themselves as in the omniscient one of the narrator. Like what's  
going on is an intimation of age and maturity, the slow settling into  
life as she really is and the regret that comes with it. All of which  
seems fairly thematically central in Pynchon's later works.

Semi-related -- the reuse of the device of fictional voices breaking  
into the "real" of the novel -- from the CoC in ATD to the Ghastly  
Fop in M&D to what in GR and VL? There's a sense of loss in this too.

And since I'd rather post half-formed thoughts all at once, the final  
section of ATD suggested to me that Lake obv. = Veronica Lake?

--S