Pynchon Character Names

[Dave Monroe]

On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 8:17 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-3458-9

   "Pynchon clearly borrows from the brad hsitory of fictional name
giving, but his approach is not so narrow as that of many writers.
While Pynchon takes from the naming tradition, he also distorts it:

In Pynchon's texts names do not operate as they do in, for example,
Fielding in which Thwackum or Allworthy are--or do--exactly what their
names indicate.  We usually expect to find the person in his or her
name.  In a realist book, as in life, the name comes to signify a real
character with unique characteristics,  This goes along with a very
tenuous notion of the unique individual. Pynchon blows al this up.
'Character' and identity are not stable in his fiction.... Pynchon
indicates that he can see how, in various ways, people are subject to
the authority of naming: how a whole society can exercise its power
through naming.  As an author he also has to confer names on his
figures, but he does so i such a way as to sabotage the conventional
modes of naming.  {Tanner 60]

"And he does this largely by refusing to use character names in one
consistent way...." (Hurley, p. 5, citing Tony Tanner, Thomas Pynchon
[London: Methuen, 1982])