ATDTDA (14) p 398: General Spoilers re the Chums' ending in ATD

[Mark Kohut]

One 'take' I have had on the Chums is tht TRP
  gets to show a "corporation" --albeit small--in action.
  TRP did not have to give them 'promotions" and new 
  professional titles..........BUT
   
  it is clear they are not a merry anarchic--in the sense of
  each doing what needs done naturally--band. They are
  'part of the problem" not part of TRP's solution. 
   
  Rereading the beginning on the Chums, with knowledge of 
  the ending, I think, the line about "an earthly" education
  resonates differently for me.....
   
  First, from Gravity's Rainbow, newly discovered: "the gift of 
  Daedalus [we know that gift vis-a-vis the Chums] that allowed him
  [Pokler] to put as much labyrinth as possible between himself
  and the INCONVENIENCES OF CARING [My caps]. They had sold him
  convenience, so much of it, all on credit and now They were collecting.
   
  The Chums act like earthly helpers....seen by some on the ground as
  angels..BUT
   
  They give all that up--for marriage, family, breaking with the 'corporation" and becoming
  entrepreneurs, for an "earthly life"........as the fly off [between the Wars] into 'grace'.
  [taking things as they are in Lew Basnight's epiphany]
   
  Is all of the above 'the fateful discovery' that the band wishes they had not adventured into?
   
  Mark

mikebailey at speakeasy.net wrote:
  Darby Suckling now Ship's Legal Officer.

Chick Counterfly had previously been promoted to
Ship's Science Officer.

Even though he was picked up more recently,
wasn't he? 

I can imagine the complaints Darby might have
had about the promotion over his head.
In fact, maybe he earned the Legal Officer
position with them. (the complaints)

But all this is speculation.

Fairly straightforward page, I think.

one thing that stands out - and gives rise
to questions - is the 
foreshadowing, "He would recall these words in
days to come with a certain bitterness, the little
band by then having embarked on a journey of
fateful discovery which each in his own way would
come to wish he had not set out upon."

--- now about that foreshadowing:
(minor spoiler)
The Chums's life never does get all that
terrible in the parts we get to read.

Ergo, a door opens for speculations:
is there a complete Chums adventure - a single
adventure like "The Chums in the Bowels of the Earth"
to be pieced together within ATD? 

or an imputed single adventure
of which not all the parts appear in ATD?

I gotta say, it looks like not.

The allusions to other adventures,
the tale of their failure in Iceland (not something
that would've happened to Tom Swift or the Hardy Boys)
and, especially, what happens to them at the very end, 
not to mention the language and (usually) good-humored
inter-Chum insults, are all departures from 
adventure-serial praxis 

It's a more open-ended adventure, perhaps a 
meta-narrative and a counterpoint to the Traverse adventure.






       
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