ATDTDA (3) Dynamitic mania, 80-86

Tore Rye Andersen torerye at hotmail.com
Thu Mar 1 03:22:50 CST 2007


Laura wrote:

>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.

Yeah, I could also have done with a Slothrop or two in AtD. GR is in many 
ways more complex and confusing than AtD, but Slothrop sort of holds 
everything together, doesn't he, even when he is scattered all over the 
place towards the end of the novel. And in fact, Slothrop is much more to me 
than just a 'crutch' or an 'anchor'. It's a funny thing: On the one hand 
Slothrop is clearly one of the most cartoonish fictional characters I've 
ever stumbled upon, moving through the Zone as a cardboard Rocketman or 
gaudy Plechazunga; but on the other hand he is also probably the most 
touching fictional character I've encountered. As that poor schmuck wanders 
lonely through the blasted Zone, "good-bys in his pockets warming his empty 
hands...." (GR, 532), I really feel for him as I rarely feel for any 
fictional character (including the hundreds of characters in AtD). A-and 
Slothrop's verbal tic: "Quit fooling" gets to me every time: it's the 
expression of an insecure child who never really learned to trust his 
parents, and who is consequently never really sure whether he can trust 
other people or not. Is that a lump in my throat I detect? I guess so....

On a less mawkish note, the lack of a central protagonist (or a central pair 
of protagonists, as in V. and M&D) makes AtD resemble Vineland. In Vineland 
we also have a group of characters that are more or less equally important: 
Zoyd, Prairie, Frenesi, DL, Takeshi, (and even Brock Vond), but Vineland is 
of course a much shorter book than AtD and the plot is more clearly 
delineated, so the absence of a central protagonist in that novel isn't as 
notable as it is in the vast landscape of AtD.

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