Free? What's free?

[Monte Davis]

Good reading, good questions. Yes, you are intended to be in doubt:

1: whether Slothrop has really escaped the control of the White Visitation
group, or pinballed on to the next phase of their plan
2: WTF "free" even means, given all he's learned at the Casino about his
own past and its intertwining with the agendas of the Zone.

That moment in the Rue Rossini is the starting point of Herman &
Weisenburger's excellent _GR, Domination, and Freedom_, and that question
its epigraph. As you keep the moment in mind, keep also that moment three
pages earlier:

"Just for the knife-edge, here in the Rue Rossini, there comes to Slothrop
the best feeling dusk in a foreign city can bring: just where the sky’s
light balances the electric lamplight in the street, just before the first
star, some promise of events without cause, surprises, a direction at right
angles to every direction his life has been able to find up till now."

Maybe that's just a glimmer of Jiminy Cricket optimism, dopey Tyrone
setting himself up for another pratfall. Maybe.



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?"
>
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