IV

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Good point, Robin -- the sense that Pynchon may have felt at the time that he was something of a PI himself.

And there's something of, if not a writer, then an authorial observer in Doc.  The final violent confrontation, which Tore pointed out seems surprising and shocking, is very different from Doc's previous behavior.  He does little more than observe people, passively, the way an author might.  There's no sense, for example, that when Doc shows up, shit's gonna go down.  He mingles with people, talks to them (occasionally screws them) but observes them from an emotional distance (even Shasta evokes only modest, hurt quips -- no emotional outbursts), the way TRP the writer may have back in the day.

Laura


-----Original Message-----
>From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>

>
>Pynchon is not "Doc" but Pynchon did an investigation of sources of  
>power and the corruption of that power during the era of the  
>"Gumshoe" [and the V-2] in Gravity's Rainbow. And while Jules Siegel  
>may have had an ax to grind, Gravity's Rainbow is still the most  
>spectacularly psychedelic book in American Letters.