V-2nd - 2: Who's your favorite Pynchonian character?

[alice wellintown]

"The novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wiggles
out of the rules thrown around it. And the novelistic character is the
very Houndi of that exceptionalism." Wood, James _How Fiction Works_

Major or Minor, Flat or Round, Dynamic or Static ...? These attempts
to characterize character are useful ..and we migh compare our
favorite quest protagonists in P novels, so Stencil to Oedipa to
Slothrop to Prairie to Dixon&Mason to ...the term "protagonist might
get in the way here but ...I'd suggest that how P makes the reader
like a character, be it Slothrop or Brock Vond, is a more interesting
question.

Anyway, I like Stencil and Carl Barrington and Slothrop ...because P
makes them in the manner he describes in his discussion of the Gothic
character in his Luddite Essay.

 Alfonso, like Frankenstein's creature, is assembled from pieces --
sable-plumed helmet, foot, leg, sword, all of them, like the hand,
quite oversized -- which fall from the sky or just materialize here
and there about the castle grounds, relentless as Freud's slow return
of the repressed. The activating agencies, again like those in
Frankenstein, are non-mechanical. The final assembly of "the form of
Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude," is achieved through
supernatural means: a family curse, and the intercession of Otranto's
patron saint.