ATDTDA (5.4) - Bad Ice After Midnight

[Ya Sam]

A-and now for something completely different

By surrounding the odalisque with an aura of vagueness, Pynchon
>succeeds in making his tale both more scary and more universal.

That was pretty puzzling for me when Pynchon revealed the Nunatak 'spirit' 
as an odalisque. Why odalisque? And, what is more important, who decided 
that it was an odalisque or odalisque-like? The narrator, that's for sure, 
but that should be the reaction of the expedition members as well. So has it 
to do with the popularity of the oriental culture in Europe and the States 
at the time, so that people used to the iconography of the mysterious East 
(harems, eunochs, sultans) etc. immediately pinpointed the image of an 
oriental woman lurking in the nunatak as an odalisque. But what if it was 
just a regular belly-dancer?

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