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

[alice wellintown]

I suspect that when you guys are talkin bout narrative voices, points
of view, storytelling and what not. . .you know that these are not
character. . .  and that bringing characters to life, though narrative
(one of the four elements of characterization--1. act, 2. speak, 3.
think and feel, 4. described) is better discussed under the formal
term, style and that P's style in V., and in the early essays and slow
learner stories, is still raw--the influence and anxiety of Modernism,
from, as Mark noted, Adams, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, and
from the American Romance--Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, Brown, and of
course, the new and novel experimentors in the quest and picaresque
genres, all used a parodic material (e.g., Benny is an On The Road
wondering scholar-- Dean Moriarty / Adams who learns nothing and is
unchanged by his adventure On This Other Side of Paradise
(Fitzgerald). Style is what you like in the voice in the sentences and
syntax, the odd turns of phrases and clauses that run on into pauses
and digressions and allusions that tingle and tangle into
progressively.

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 12:30 AM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Robin Landseadel wrote:
>> The narrator [s] of "Against the Day."
>
> something along those lines for me too...
>
> the Mad Explicator in _Gravity's Rainbow_
>
> the gyre'ing and gamboling explorer in whose voice Pynchon tells  _V._
>
> the ineffably sublime narrator of _Vineland_
>
> and so forth, sometime I might be able to clarify how the presence of
> this auctorial voice (different in each book, and varying within each
> as well, but of the same consistently high quality) is like having a
> really intelligent, but more importantly, very compassionate and
> thoughtful friend tell you a story, and how it makes all the
> characters and scenes come alive...
>
> "would you hear my voice come through the music, would you hold it
> near, as it were your own..." (Robert Hunter, probably)
>
>
> --
> Yippy dippy dippy,
> Flippy zippy zippy,
> Smippy gdippy gdippy, too!
> - Thomas Pynchon ("'Zo Meatman's Gone AWOL")
>