V-2nd - 2: Part II - questions, comments?

[alice wellintown]

On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 2:46 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> 1. Here's the description of the young man Esther picks up at Fergus' party:
>
> "the fraternity boy just out of an Ivy League school who knows he will never stop being a fraternity boy as long as he lives.  But who still feels he is missing something ... If he is going into management he writes.  If he is an engineer or an architect why he paints or sculpts.  He will straddle the line, aware up to the point of knowing he is getting the worst of both worlds, but never stopping to wonder why there should ever have been a line, or even if there is a line at all."
>
> Young Pynchon, technical writer at Boeing and aspiring novelist, mocking himself, or at least rejecting that which he's been?

Seems a reasonable conjecture. The description is so typical of the
two cultures conflict that frat boys of the day were wrestling with, a
struggle that continues even in these Post-Snowian daze or what Adams
called the daze of Multiplicity, however, that attributing it to an
auto-biographical conflict  risks missing the larger point about
Education.