Discuss

[alice wellintown]

One article I like on this is "Gravity's Rainbow" and the postmodern
picaro by Regine Rosenthal.

"Gravity's Rainbow" and the postmodern picaro
 Regine ROSENTHAL

Revue française d'études américaines , No. 42, MÉTAMORPHOSES
LITTÉRAIRES DU QUOTIDIEN: FAMILIER, ÉTRANGE, PITTORESQUE (Novembre
89), pp. 407-426

After a brief intro to the history of the genre, the author looks into
the development of the modern picaro in 1950s American Fiction, so
Bellow's AAM and Ellison's IM;

the author errs, I think,  in bringing in the Bildungsroman, but this
is not a big mistake, nor does it undermine the author's claim that
Slothrop is a postmodern Picaro. though how he differs so much from
the examples in Bellow and Ellison is not easy to see from the sketch
provided. That sketch, of Slothrop's development, is an excellent
summary and is full of the analysis that argues the complexity of his
identity and quest.

And, when we look to McHale, say, and the notion of Kansas as Zone,
and to Slothrop asa Dorothy with nothing to follow a road to or for,
we see that he is surely a Picaro in a Postmodern zone, but I would
argue that IM is as well, and so, postmodern is only more lete
modernism, Pynchon a student of the early modernist Melville.