IV more thoughts on killing Puck

[Henry M]

Puck is one of the meanest brutes in the Pynchon canon.  Like Major
Marvy, and more than one man (always a man) in ATD, he needs killing.

AsB4,

Henry Mu
http://astore.amazon.com/tdcoccamsaxe-20


On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 12:55 PM, Robert Mahnke <rpmahnke at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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?