The Wreck of the Read. chap 3

[Richard Ryan]

What's especially fine about this chapter is how Gaddis gives us a
vivid portrait of a marriage (an archetypal "first" marriage) in which
both of the partners are fully realized and sympathetic on some
level...and yet the reader is left wondering: "How did these two
people ever make the disastrous mistake of getting married?"

On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 3:30 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> Your response to these characters says a lot about Gaddis' skill at
> creating vibrant individuals in text.  And he does it very
> cryptically, at least with these two.
>
> On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 7:18 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> As someone has just written about this chapter, Esther
>> will not let Wyatt be...............................
>>
>> that is (one of) the extraordinary achievements  of this
>> chapter, imho. The way Gaddis piles on and builds this
>> perception--this whole atmosphere of emotional connection
>> that goes too far, it seems, in Esther--what we might gloss
>> as her narcissism.
>>
>> Gloss attempt: Narcissism, psychologically = all about me, the whole
>> world as it impacts me, my sensibility. [see that perception in the
>> Dylan movie, I'm Not There] IF one is so, what one loses is
>>
>> Reality?."Why do you smoke after?"
>> "Reality", says Wyatt. Who is trying to deal with 'reality' outside himself.
>>
>> Why I liked this so, besides perhaps my own narcissism, is that I see it
>> as a situation we all might know--I think I do anyway---in some form.
>>
>> Which I have talked about with some friends as the overspilling of (some)
>>  emotions.
>> Two people living together, don't even have to be husband & wife, often start
>> having
>> feelings/thoughts dependant on the other and which therefore start conditioning
>> the reality they supposedly share. . Fill in your own examples, if you see it
>> this way.
>>
>>
>> Related from literature: When Kitty (In Anna K.) has her ardent, youthfully
>> hopeful, fantasy-based
>>
>>  'being in loveness' with Vronsky rebuffed, Tolstoy knows her feelings cannot
>> just easily end.
>>
>> He sends her off to live with an older woman friend of her family, a wise,
>> energetic, charmingly
>> charismatic woman who sets Kitty on a schedule of work and activity (to forget,
>> of course) but
>> with whom Tolstoy says she, Kitty, "falls in love".....not physically of course,
>> not even erotically
>>
>> (except subterreanianly) but just as a way to show where her ardent spirits
>> went...........
>>
>
>



-- 
Richard Ryan
New York and the World
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