ATDTDA: That graceful ending

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Laura quoted:

>"...and now, in the Zone, later in the day he became a crossroad, after a 
>heavy rain he doesn't recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a 
>stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet 
>valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in 
>his head, just feeling natural ..." (GR, 626)

- and concluded that:

>Reading it this way, the Chums are heading towards acceptance of the 
>inevitable, their smoked glasses protecting them against the impending 
>glare of WWII rockets and atomic bombs.  Not so happy an ending.

Yes - and the connection between what may actually come to part the sky for 
Slothrop (and the Chums) and atomic bombs is underlined by the echoes 
between Slothrop's vision of a "rainbow cock driven down out of pubic 
clouds" and this description of the newspaper photo showing the atomic bomb 
over Hiroshima:

"In one of these streets, in the morning fog, plastered over two slippery 
cobblestones, is a scrap of newspaper headline, with a wirephoto of a giant 
white cock, dangling in the sky straight downward out of a white pubic 
bush." (GR, 693)

Slothrop's final destiny in GR is both a happy and an apocalyptical one, and 
the same goes for those Chums and their smoked goggles.

Speaking of what is coming to part the sky: the title page of the original 
Viking edition of GR isn't just innocently white: the title and the name of 
the author is printed on a background of a stormy, cloudy sky: one part of 
this sky is much brighter than the others, as if something is just about to 
break through. Wouldn't it have been beautiful if the designers of AtD had 
placed a photo just like it on the final page of that novel?

/Tore

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