IV more thoughts on killing Puck

[Robert Mahnke]

I was just catching up on old posts, including the "IV Killing Puck"
chain (inc. Rob Jackson's 12/14/09 12:30 pm message) and the "IV
Chapter 18 Thoughts" chain (inc. rich's 12/13/09 14:31 pm message),
and thought I would toss this out there, since if someone else said
it, I missed it.

Apropos of Doc killing Puck with the injection of heroin, I see
resistance to the idea that this is what happened, both in the vein
(sorry) of "Doc didn't really kill him" (e.g., don't we really know
that air bubbles aren't fatal?) and also "Doc was high" (and therefore
presumably not culpable). What I see is readers who have come to
sympathize with Doc as a hero (for some, the putative narrator,
reliable, stoned or otherwise) and who react with some degree of
cognitive dissonance to the idea that he could kill someone in cold
blood, albeit someone as deserving of it as Puck may be. I don't have
the text in front of me, but is there any real doubt that Doc is
offing Puck? Doesn't the mention of the air bubble simply underscore
the malice of the act? If Doc is under the influence, does that really
excuse or change what he's doing?

IV is, after all, set at a time when the promise of the 60's began to
turn sour, e.g., with the reminders of the Manson killings. At the
start of IV, we are surely meant to like Doc -- to identify with his
cultural preferences and outsider status but also to respect that he
can make a living as a PI. But it turns out that he can't straddle the
line without sometimes getting on the wrong side of it, and that he
can't make this living without doing some wrong.  (Like the hero of
any other noir, right?) We keep liking Doc, but then there's this
business of killing Puck.

It's possible that the thoughts above draw too much from Edward
Mendelson's reading of Vineland, "Levity's Rainbow," 44 New Republic
(July 9-16, 1990). Or it could be a Correspondence, and more than
Kute. Is Doc a more sympathetic take on the compromises made by
Frenesi?