Back to V., MB's structure post cont.

[Dave Williams]

or this one: 
 
Pynchon’s entire project of elucidating the allegory of the V is genre-related, as he places himself in the mythic and symbolic tradition of the romance-novel.  The novel as romance pursues “truth” in the surreal and at the edges of human experience.  Pynchon finds his insights at the interface between disciplines and the coming together of symbolic seams in the universe.  He looks for obscure incidents in history formed at the “interfaces” between cultures to find clues to the workings of the V.  Pynchon’s allegorical method fits well the conventions of the romance-novel that allow the novelist to go beyond the realm of ordinary reality in search of “truth.”
Pynchon hints in both V and Gravity’s Rainbow that he sees himself as continuing the tradition of Hawthorne and Melville.5  He may have Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Melville’s Moby Dick in mind as intertexts for his early novels.  As allegory, The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick offer problems of interpretation for characters and reader of what appear to be allegorical signs, opening a dialectic in which differing “readings” are available.  I would suggest that Thomas Pynchon found the allegorical complexity of Hawthorne useful as a model for his own allegory of the V6.
 
http://allegoriaparanoia.com/pynchon/early_stories/chapter1.html
 


      
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