Been Down So Long, Looks Like Up to Me ...

[Dave Monroe]

Undergraduate consciousness rests in part on a set of careless
assumptions about being immortal. The elitism and cruelty often found
in college humor arises from this belief in one's own Exemption, not
only from time and death, but somehow from the demands of life as
well. It is Exemption --in a sense which Farina interestingly broadens
here-- that so perplexes and haunts the novel's main character,
Gnossos Pappadopoulis.

For Gnossos, Exemption is nothing he can either take for granted or
have illusions about. His life is a day-to-day effort to keep earning
and maintaining it. In the course of the book, Gnossos looks at a
number of possibilities, including Eastern religion, road epiphanies,
mescaline, love. All turn out to have a flaw of some kind. What he's
left with to depend on is his own coherence, an extended version of
1950s Cool. "Immunity has been granted to me," thinks Gnossos, "for I
do not lose my cool." Backed up by a range of street-wise skills like
picking locks and scoring dope, Cool gets Gnossos through, and it lies
at the heart of his style.

http://www.libyrinth.com/pynchon/pynchon_paper_farina.html
http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/farina.html