Prairie vs. Zoyd as Protagonist of Vineland

[Dave Williams]

> 
> Whatever Pynchon may or may not be, the author does not
> dwell o're much in the nineteenth century. There may well be
> a Blakeian aspect, an aspect that echos and rhymes with the
> New England Transcendentalists and other 'non-scheduled
> theologies" but there's also an aspect of the Beats and
> Hippies that rhymes with Blake and his drunk and rowdy
> crowd. By the time we got to San Narcisco the waters were
> already on fire. Pynchon's despair for what was lost may
> well be allied to nineteenth-century impulses, but the
> content is fairly well fixed in the twentieth and
> twenty-first centuries. A major concern is America as Empire
> post WWII, a decidedly post-modern subject.


Well, like Us and Henry Adams, he may be a child of Romance (Beat Hippie Shaggy Scooby), but he is decidely a twentieth century man. He wrote a novel set during the enlightenment period in America that is ironically and arguably his best romance. The work makes clear wherethe author has taken his romantic influences from. The LED and the shipping