The narrator of "Bartleby"

[Bekah]

Buddy Holly?  

Bekah
who remembers it - (gads)

On Dec 31, 2011, at 7:25 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

> 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