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

[alice wellintown]

Remember, Profane is half Jewish (Benny and parody of Job) and half
Italian (Profane Roman Catholic and parody of Prometheus).  The self
condemnation is Catholic guilt? Catholic sexual repression and
guilt--those condoms he hangs on the doors are clearly Jewish and
Catholic.  He is also, and more importantly, a parody of the American
Hero or all that rugged individualism, go West and Manifest, On the
Road and Wandering Scholar (American style--the navy) stuff that
Pynchon describes in his SL Introduction, characteristics that are
both invested in him in parodic ways, like his less than super-human
resourcefulness and failure at independent masculinity (Bumpo,
Queequeq & Ishmael, RPM), which of course, P reads, in the SL essay
anyway, as the immature American Male who won't grow up and commit.
Benny is, like many a Romance figure, invested with all manner of
paradox and contradiction, subversion of binaries and weaving of lines
and hemp fast to a quest not his own. So, although P may fail to write
a Jewish figure as Roth or the better Roth does, he doesn't actually
try to. It's not his shtick.