The narrator of "Bartleby"

[alice wellintown]

Yeah, Slothrop, like Bartleby, is a passive resistor, though his
picaresque characteristics, we might argue, are invested in the
lawyer-narrator who wanders and wonders about... We first encounter
the name Slothrop in that best of the short stories, "The Secret
Integration," a Doctor Slothrop and his son Hogan have minor yet
significant parts in the drama in the New England setting Pynchon
creates by re-locating his Long Island childhood world and the most
pressing issues of his youth, racial integration, real estate
development, and the loss of labor to military industrial complex
automation to New England where he can exploit the rich Pyncheon
family history and the American puritan legacy while grafting his
parodies, of Twain and Stratemeyer (Victor Appleton) on to a boyz tale
that gives us some of the castaways, renegades, and orphans, the parts
secretly assembled by the kids from what the adults dissembled,  but
the kids, led by the intelligent but not too smart, boy genius,
Grover, exposed, resisted, and ultimately, passively, though
anxiously,  sublimated.
It may be difficult for readers to grasp the humor of Melville’s
Bartleby, but there it is, as subversive and as parodic as Pynchon’s
in his brilliant tale. Both authors play a confidence game, both force
the reader to distrust trust, to laugh (again like Kesey’s theme in
Cuckoo’s Nest, ) at the absurdity of the tale and its characters
(Turkey? Hogan Slothrop?).
There was a strange, inflamed, flurried, flighty recklessness of
activity about him. He would be incautious in dipping his pen into his
inkstand. All his blots upon my documents, were dropped there after
twelve o’clock, meridian. Indeed, not only would he be reckless and
sadly given to making blots in the afternoon, but some days he went
further, and was rather noisy. At such times, too, his face flamed
with augmented blazonry, as if cannel coal had been heaped on
anthracite.

Hogan Slothrop, the doctor's kid, who at the age of eight had taken to
serious after-bedtime beer-drinking and at the age of nine got
religion, swore off beer and joined the Alcoholics Anonymous, a step
his father, who was what is known as permissive, gave his blessing to
and which the local A.A. group tolerated because they thought having a
kid around would be inspirational.
But, as the boy, whose father owns the junkyard and whose name I can't
recall just now, sez:

My love, a-bigger than the Cadillac
I try to show it 'n you drive-a me back
Your love for me, it got to be real
A-for you to know a-just how I feel
A love for real, not fade away



On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 2:34 AM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> point-for-point it doesn't really work, but the broadest outline is
>> similar: he prefers not to go along,
>
> with business as usual, that is
>
>> and he fades away