ATDTDA - petroleurs, p.19

[David Morris]

On 1/30/07, Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>  Mark Kohut:
> > The web (sic) of revenge Webb is caught in, as he traverses moral boundaries, makes him unable  to live out the day-to-day life of simple (never really simple--in fact I remember  a line about the  "almost infinite" day-to-dayness, I think.) husband and father.
>
> Maybe you're thinking of the next-generation version on p. 360, explaining why Reef and Stray don't settle down?
[...]
> "It put a shade onto things that parlor life would just never touch, so whenever she or Reef pulled up and got out, when it wasn't, mind, simple getting away in a hurry, it was that one of them had heard about a place, some place, one more next-to-last place, that hadn't been taken in yet, where you could go live for a time on the edge of that old day-to-day question..."
>
> This comes close to the Zone of ambivalence at the heart of all Pynchon's books. He has an abiding sympathy for the outsider, the anarchist, the oddball, the utopian, the revolutionary. But he also has a painfully clear eye -- from the family scale to the historical scale -- for every trait that ensures they will *stay* marginal, and *not* change the world closer to their hearts' desire. For me, that's why he can get away with the pasteboard villains: because the deepest fault, dear reader, is not in our Scarsdales but in ourselves.

The motives of Webb vs Reef are also interesting to examine.  Webb has
his moments of revelation with the union preacher and with the
alchemist photographer.  One might say he was in love with the crusade
and its methods (and thus a bit selfish).  Reef on the other hand is
mostly moved by guilt, all the dead that follow him around.  His
wanderlust is only a symptom of that, his salve for the wound of
guilt.

David Morris