VL--IV Passivity, more active thoughts

[Mark Kohut]

Michael writes/asks:


Considerations:
a) to what extent are Z and F presented as typical, normative?

b) are my liking of, and admitted likeness in some ways to, them
unique to me?  Am I the only person who gloms tips for living from
them?

c)  F being an informer, and a paid informer utilizing sex at that,
hater of her baby during post-partum depression, surprisingly easily
turned by Brock Vond,
do all those things kill the possibility of sympathy for her, of
something to learn from her, of partial validity and/or
understandability in her choices?
__________________________________________________

I think, via the nature of Pynchon's fiction, that we are to read Z & F as
his take on hippieness, on hippieness in American society not as an ideal.   
At least, on a strain of hippiedom from the 60s, the strain that "failed"?

As I reread, I am more impressed with how LIKEABLE TRP makes them.....
they are very likeable, just like meeting "flower children", such uncharacter-armored people...so nice, they have such fine qualities.

Yet, deeper reading shows what he ALSO thinks about them. (And many critics say he cannot create complex characters...or did not until M & D)

No, I think we can have sympathy for Frenesi and one way TRP handles it is to have her betrayal come out of this 'open' character
quality.....