Idle Zoyd, Crappy Vineland?

[Robin Landseadel]

To Michael Bailey: Frenesi is an interesting idea for the protagonist,  
for all the reasons you’ve given [and more]. Of course by the time we  
get to Against the Day it’s hard to find anything like a single  
protagonist, except maybe light itself. In any case note that Zoyd,  
Frenesi and Prairie make up a nuclear family—broken, perhaps like all  
those windows at the Cucumber Lounge but a modern [postnuclear?]  
nuclear family anyway. And again, it’s worth noting that Pynchon  
dedicated Vineland to his mother and father. Mason & Dixon, dedicated  
to his wife and son, has dual protagonists. Pynchon, in the process of  
maturing, develops ever more interconnected social networks as the  
years go by. Unless the excerpt from Inherent Vice is a journal within  
the novel, it appears that the narrator’s voice will be in the first  
person singular of classic hard-boiled crime fiction. From Oedipa’s  
detective work, investigating Trystero, to Prairie’s, investigating  
[and hoping to connect with] her mother, to Doc Sportello [most likely  
investigating himself], Pynchon’s “Secret Investigations” circle inward.

	Ian Whitney: “I have typically accepted Prairie as the
	protagonist because she is the one who is allowed to
	"roam free" by the end of the novel. After learning the
	identity of her mother and accepting her mother for who
	she is, Prairie achieves self-actuation.”

Agreed, with the addition of TRP’s comment from the intro of “Slow  
Learner”, speaking of his fictional children from “The Secret  
Integration”:

	“The kids, for example, seem in some areas to be not
	very bright, certainly not a patch on the kids of the ’80’s.”

. . .like world weary Slide, for instance & Prairie.
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