ATDDTA (3): Control issues, 54-56

[Tore Rye Andersen]

David Morris said:

>Pynchon couldn't make this choice of passivity by the Chums any
>clearer.  And the Chums motive (besides "peace of mind")?  To remain
>infantile, children forever, a belief, not a fact, which soon starts
>to fray around its edges.

Cf. also this passage from Vineland:

"Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left 
not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was 
proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers 
were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep - if he'd allowed himself to 
feel it, the sometimes touching - need only to stay children forever, safe 
inside some extended national Family." (VL, 269)

In many ways Pynchon's treatment of this theme in AtD is even more poignant 
than the outspokenness of Vineland. In Vineland Pynchon more or less give us 
the straight dope (as it were), and he's pretty explicit in his critique of 
this wish to stay children forever. In AtD he doesn't explicitly condemn the 
Chums but leaves it to the reader to see the irony of the narrator's 
continued insistence to call the Chums "the boys", despite the clear loss of 
innocence they - against their wishes - experience throughout the novel. 
After having witnessed what they do during World War I it takes at least a 
wilful act of blindness to remain boys....

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