IVIV1: Introducing Pynchon's burgher

[John Carvill]

> from a review Doug sent:
> "he does, amid the fog of skunky smoke, have a moral center."
>
> Discussion challenge: Some have expressed the notion of Doc as unreliable narrator. Degrees of that, of course, he isn't hallucinating but what is his distance from the author's vision?
>
> What is Doc's 'moral center' if you agree with the reviewer. Or, if not, riff....

Just my opinion, but yeah, I think Doc clearly does have some sort of
moral centre. It's one of the reasons the 'details' gleaned from the
promo video were, if you took them at face value, so surprising. It's
nicely characteristic of Pynchon that we could easily argue the
'truth' of those details either way: you could make a convincing
argument for excluding them entirely from Doc's story - they're not in
the book, and that's that. Equally, you could make a strong case for
including them in what 'we know' about Doc.

With or without the promo, though, I reckon it would be very difficult
to make a convincing case that Doc has no moral centre at all.