V---2nd, Chap 13, still.....on Schlemielness.

[Mark Kohut]

Something else has been nagging me in reading and rereading V. that I finally 
self-articulated---"are you talking to me, ME?"---

Schlemiel. Benny's self-understanding (and use) of.....
To me, when heard and in my patchwork reading, I always thought Schlemiel
meant bungler, hopeless incompetent....kinda a loveable loser....

Which it does.........
Never had I ever heard or read it as associated with the kind of selfishness and 
inability to love or commit
that Benny sez of himself...after Rachel's evisceration of his inability to 
love.....

Any others have Schlemiel associations to explain why? 

From wikipedia: 
In the story, Schlemiel sells his shadow to the Devil for a bottomless wallet, 
only to find that a man without a shadow is shunned by human society. The woman 
he loves rejects him, and he spends the rest of his life wandering the world in 
scientific exploration. 

The Yiddish word Schlemiel—and its Hebrew cognate Shlumi'el—mean a hopelessly 
incompetent person, a bungler. Consequently, the name is a synonym of one who 
makes a desperate or silly bargain.