IV more thoughts on killing Puck

[alice wellintown]

> 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?

Everytime I show Cuckoo's Nest the students aplaud when RPM chokes
Nurse Ratched. Some applaud when Chief puts the pillow over RPM's face
and when Chief pulls up the sink and smashes through the window to
freedom. But it's the scene when RPM chokes Nurse Rached that gets
them. The young men smile and shake their fists, high five, bob their
heads, the young women check and see for the most part, join in or
shrink a bit. RPM doesn't stuff medications down her throat or jolt
her with shock thearapy electicity or light his own cigarrette over
her as she squirms helpless and inafantalized crouched in a fetal
position. But the emasculating bitch, her starched white crown knocked
to the ground has gotten what she had coming. Or has she? Like IV, CN
is a novel about...well ...lots of things but about men and thier
work. RPM, in long shoreman's watchcap,  ends up in the nut house
cause he doesn't want to do his work over at the prsion. The black
men, working under the white nurse, though this is not as evident in
the play or film as in the novel, push their brooms off on the loons.
Larry earns the name Doc because he threatens people with a syringe.
It's his job; it comes, as Willie Lowman sez, with the territory. Or
does it? Lowman sez, it's Dreams what come with the territory. Dreams
of football, baseball games, the world series, a beer, fishing,
playing cards, driving a hot rod and, as RPM reminds Billy, busting
beaver. Does IV, as VL before it, though feminist, lament the
emasculation of the American Dream? Larry is small. The Chief only
imagines he is. The Chief's pathology is brought on, in part, by the
abuse of booze (by his old man) and by the machines of Manifest
Destiny. Go West, Jack. The West is the  Best. But Larry has no place
to go. He's just a killer now.

>
> 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?
>