ATDTDA (3) Dynamitic mania, 80-86

[kelber at mindspring.com]

I was personally disappointed when I began to realize that there'd be no protagonist, no Slothrop, in this book.  It's not a matter of having a protagonist to identify with, but rather having some kind of viewpoint on which to anchor oneself.  I think it was a deliberate choice Pynchon made -- there is no single viewpoint where history is concerned.  But, hell, it was a crutch I wanted, anyway.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com>

 Perhaps Pynchon doesn't so much 
>let us identify with his characters as place us on the same level as them. 
>They and we are faced with many of the same choices and encounter many of 
>the same moral quandaries as we move through the fictional world/the text, 
>respectively. When Pynchon in GR speaks of "the path you must create by 
>yourself alone in the dark" (136), I think he speaks of both the characters' 
>trajectory through the text, the act of reading that text, and of our life 
>outside that text. The structure of the text is a formal reenactment of the 
>world described in that text, and that world mirrors our own. Reading a 
>novel by Pynchon thus becomes not an act of consumption, where a more or 
>less passive reader is 'drawn into' the text, but an act of active 
>participation in its textual world. It's perhaps not so much a matter of 
>engaging with the characters, as you rightly point out, Paul, as of engaging 
>with the problems they have to engage with. In that sense, however, I DO 
>think it is perfectly possible to identify with the characters, and I DO 
>wish that Frank hadn't blown up that damn train.
>
>Best,
>
>Tore
>