VL--IV Passivity, more active thoughts

[Michael Bailey]

kelber wrote:
> We keep getting back to the issue of Pynchon's characters and I think we'd all agree that if you're looking for rich character studies, don't bother with Pynchon.


who's got better ones?
sure, there's stuff about power, society and big ideas.  But you can
get that in textbooks.
The, or, a major anyway, hook that makes his presentation special is
the characters.

Dubliners: In what specific way are the characters in "Ivy Day in the
Committee Room" more redolent of reality than Flange or Pig Bodine?
In the Roger and Jessica sequences in GR, isn't anyone willing to say
that meaningful glimpses of human nature surface?

Don't Tchitcherine and Pirate Prentice, Hector and Rooney Winsome,
Pointsman and Weissman, Mason and Dixon, provoke cogitations and
worthwhile insights, not thorough explanations (which tend to be a
llittle boring anyway, don't they?) but through sympathy and/or
revulsion - human feelings they arouse?  By good characterization?

Slothrop, far from disappearing in my mind, becomes more real
throughout GR - contra even the text.  Even Benny Profane,
deliberately constructed as a bit of a cipher, shines through in
various ways, epiphanies tossed off casually, a datum here, a stray
thought there.

Doesn't anybody else feel, image, relish these people through the
detail provided?  Am I that warped?  (Probably, but isn't anybody
else?)

Whose characters are more carefully constructed and come through more
vividly than Pynchon's? In what way?  Examples, please?

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"All the 3s are brown, and the 5s are gray" - Paint by Numbers song