Free? What's free?

[alice malice]

Check out Chapters 10-12 of RE's Invisible Man, The Liberty Paint
Factory and the Factory Hospital.


On Mon, May 26, 2014 at 4:18 PM, Doc Sportello <coolwithdoc at gmail.com> wrote:
> "It dawns on Slothrop, literally, through the yellowbrown window shade, that
> this is his first day Outside. His first free morning. He doesn't have to go
> back. Free? What's free? He falls asleep at last. A little before noon a
> young woman lets herself in with a passkey and leaves him the papers. He is
> now an English war correspondent named Ian Scuffling."
>
> Plot question (I know right?). Am I supposed to assume Waxwing etc. are with
> PISCES etc. or in opposition? Or am I supposed to be confused as I am?
>
> Side note. That paragraph reminded me a lot of Bleeding Edge especially when
> I read this on the next page:
>
> "The War has been reconfiguring time and space into it's own image. The
> track runs in different networks now. What appears to be destruction is
> really the shaping of railroad spaces to other purposes, intentions he can
> only, riding through it for the first time, begin to feel the leading edges
> of..."
>
> On one hand Slothrop is free from "The White Visitation" but is now
> vulnerable to some other, greater, might-as-well-be cosmic threat. His
> freedom is a paradox since it seems to tend him toward another structuring.
> The War, like the Internet, is not just destruction and chaos, it's being
> kneaded, potentially to create whatever They want. Indeed "What is free?"
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l