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

[Michael Bailey]

 alice wellintown wrote:
> 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.
>

robin probably wasn't - the narrator appears in AtD, and his choice of
styles is more than just an element of style...the Chums narrator and
so forth are plot elements, he plays a part in the book.

I was riffing on that idea, but I'll admit a lot of truth in what you
say.  Narrative voice (started to type "narrative vice") is a
different thing than a character, and I'm not going to argue about
that, although I think there is something fishy about the idea of a
character in general (we were never that concerned with Slothrop qua
Slothrop), since we are actually talking about words on a page, but I
don't want to push too hard on that because obviously that is true of
any separate story-part and stories as a whole...
...just that a notion of character, separate from the rest of the
story, is like isolating cocaine or white sugar from coca leaves or
sugar cane, you lose a lot of vitamins and stuff...

But, that doesn't mean we don't do it.

So, I'll change my vote to Merle.