V---2nd

[redcomrad]

Are you suggesting that the author has tacked a moral on to Benny? Or is it that the author has tacked on an idea at the end of the work; an idea he has, perhaps, failed to show and thus needs to tell? An idea about fiction? Has the idea something to do with the reader and the fictionality of fiction or characters? Certainly the lady(s) V and all that we learn about her story and her/his history is, if parodic and ironic, is not a character we learn a damn thing about, for she remains a mystery as she must, even as we learn too much about her story and her history/mystery. Can't recall Chase or Booth, but I doesn't Twain's novel warn the reader not to tack a moral on to the tale? Huckleberry doesn't learn a damn thing either. Perhaps that's too rigid? He, like Benny, like Stencil like Henry Adams, learns a whole bunch of things. He learns that he can't dress up like no girl and fool no woman cause she gonna see how he throws and catches.  He does learn that Jim has a man, a father with a daughter and that Jim beat his daughter and now feels grief and guilt for beating her. He knows Jim's theory about language and the origins of the stars aint no match for his own theory. But he never does figure out, even after Jim risks his freedom and his black skin to protect and save Tom, that Jim ain't one exceptional nigger out of the whole bunch who is still, still should ever be, lower than Pap, the property of another person who has every right to own him. He never does navigate that moral fork in the river. He ain't really learned a god damned thing niether. He's just a boy. Benny, well, he's...as Pynchon sez, an American male. ---- On Fri, 21 Jan 2011 06:23:52 -0500 Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote ----  Soon we will get to the famous and oft-quoted by us even part of V. where Benny proclaims he has learned nothing. Some scholars and commentators on the novel in general' have focussed on that sayin' it is one of the novel's weaknesses 'cause in good novels the character 'develops".... Leaving aside Benny's reliability with that remark, I have read this from Richard Chase, that afore-mentioned definer of romance vs. the novel and teacher of Wayne Booth, of The Rhetoric of Fiction: "Characters in American fiction who seem to be, because of their situation and prospects. candidates for initiation do not usually change much under the pressure of what happens to them".............. This in his chapter on Twain specifically on Huck Finn and he gives other examples....he says when the author says they have changed it usually sounds like 'a moral' tacked on................................ So, if the Benny part of V. is about Benny's 'initiation' it is in a grand tradition.
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