IVIV1: Introducing Pynchon's burgher

[alice wellintown]

Well, many a reader would argue that to search for some moral center
or ethos or "implied author" norms is to impose on postmodern fiction
standards of clarity and emotional intensity derived from
pre-modernist fiction. The difficulties of such a reading are
compounded by modernist and postmodernist techniques employed by
authors which reflect and engage (post)modern cultural and historical
life. Of course one such technique is the unreliable narrator; a
technique that is by design confusing and open to ambiguities. Add
this to the Romantic elements (Hawthorne's Prefaces or Chase ) and the
contradictions and dialectics that are essential to Romantic texts and
you have an easy victory for the Indeterminates an Ironics, moral and
otherwise.

Moral questions are bound to the techniques employed.

see Booth The Rhetoric of Fiction second ed. p.378