GR translation: except that the man was never really alive

[Al Haidar]

I take this as Slothrop writing off or entertaining the idea of Jamf as
merely a figment of his imagination--an attractive alternative to the
truth? Related to this (much) later mention of Jamf on p738?  Even though
Jamf is ostensibly a physically real entity, paranoia is just as much about
suspicion of the real as it is belief in the unreal.

"'There never was a Dr. Jamf,' opines world-renowned analyst Mickey
Wuxtry-Wuxtry--'Jamf was only a fiction'"

On Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 5:51 AM, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> OR -  it could mean something more along the lines of  Jamf was never
> really "alive"  in an animated sense.  He may have walked and talked and
> breathed,  but he was never a really feeling and animated human being.   He
> was more like an unfeeling robot going through life doing his horrible
> experiments   - not really functioning as a whole and on-going human being.
>
> "The man was never really alive so how can he be really -  " (dead?).
>
> But if Slothrop has no memory of him,  then I'm not sure the above makes a
> lot of sense -  yours (David) might be better.
>
> Bekah
>
>
> On Mar 9, 2013, at 9:00 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Yes.  He has no memory that he can recall of Jamf.
> >
> > On Saturday, March 9, 2013, Mike Jing wrote:
> > P264.24-37  “That stuff. Forget it. It’s not even our line. You ever try
> to develop a polymer when there’s nothing but indole people around? With
> our giant parent to the north sending in ultimatums every day? Imipolex G
> is the company albatross, Yank. They have vice-presidents whose only job is
> to observe the ritual of going out every Sunday to spit on old Jamf’s
> grave. You haven’t spent much time with the indole crowd. They’re very
> elitist. They see themselves at the end of a long European dialectic,
> generations of blighted grain, ergotism, witches on broomsticks, community
> orgies, cantons lost up there in folds of mountain that haven’t known an
> unhallucinated day in the last 500 years—keepers of a tradition,
> aristocrats—”
> > “Wait a minute. . . .”Jamf dead? “You say Jamf’s grave, now?” It ought
> to be making more of a difference to him, except that the man was never
> really alive so how can he be really—
> >
> > By "the man was never really alive", I assume Slothrop means he has
> never known Jamf in person, is that correct?
> >
>
>
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