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

[John Bailey]

"how P makes the reader like a character, be it Slothrop or Brock
Vond, is a more interesting question."

Yes it is, excellent point, well made.

I find it astonishingly difficult to give a rat's arse about any of
P's characters, really. I just don't see his novels as trying to
accomplish anything like identification or sympathy or suspension of
disbelief etc. in regards to character. Most of them are
interchangeable to me.

I suppose if pressed I'd say V. is my favourite, if only because
she/it seems to epitomise something about the 20th century human
condition that's deeply tragic in a classical sense.

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 10:50 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> "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.
>