V-2nd - Conclusion - questions

[Mark Kohut]

I'll take Question #2 for the usual amount. 

That the question can be asked might mean under the seven types of ambiguity 
rule that it is indeterminate
therefore showing TRP's brilliant demolition of modernist readers like myself by 
adding the theme of whether
this Epilogue is "Real" via Narrator or just another 'thought experiment; 
therefore another piece of the participant-observer
problem of subjective understanding........

But, if we have to choose, even if excluded middles are Bad Shit--- and I LIKE 
choosing 'cause that's the tunnel vision way
 in which I raised myself---I choose
Sorta-Omniscient Narrator just because 1956 IS referred to which only the 
Narrator should be able to do....

QED--- "but logic is a human attribute after all"---V. Epilogue, p 484 hc. and 
"the inert universe may have a quality we can
call logic"---IBID.




----- Original Message ----
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Sat, March 12, 2011 2:59:40 PM
Subject: V-2nd - Conclusion - questions

Plot-related, not thematic:

1.    "He [Stencil the elder] found himself hoping there was indeed adultery 
between his old 'love' [V.] and the shipfitter [Fausto's father]; if only to 
complete a circle begun in England eighteen years ago, a beginning kept forcibly 
from his thoughts for the same period of time.
    Herbert would be eighteen.  And probably helling it all about the dear old 
isles.  What would he think of his father ...
    His father, ha." 

V. is Herbert Stencil's mother, no?  But who is his father?  It's implied here 
that it's not Sydney Stencil.  Was Maijstral Senior present in Florence?

2.  Is the epilogue "real," i.e. told from the viewpoint of the omniscient 
Narrator, as opposed to being one of Herbert Stencil's thought experiments?
A clue that it's not real is that there's a reference to 1956.  But why does 
Herbert then imagine that the elder Stencil isn't his real father/

3.  At the end, what does Stencil drop into the water?  It can't be the eye, 
because that's removed from the Bad Priest later on.

Laura