From Cartoon to Crossroads

[Dave Monroe]

"... Slothrop discovers that not only all of his friends have all of a
sudden disappeared, but that also both his clothes and his ID are
stolen. He has literally lost his identity and has to take on his
first disguise .... Slothrop’s identity grows progressively more
confusing, not only to the reader, but also to the other characters.
Some of them do not even know whether he is European, English or
American. To many characters, and also, apparently, to the narrator
and the reader, Slothrop is a puzzle. But literally so: halfway
through his trip in the Zone, he starts losing coherence, he starts
scattering. This unrealistic condition is first mentioned and
mathematically explained when he is aboard the Anubis:

Slothrop […] has begun to thin, to scatter. “Personal density […] is
directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.”

“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now. It is the
familiar “∆t” considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell
in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more
solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more
tenuous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering
what you were doing five minutes ago, or even – as Slothrop now – what
you’re doing here. [GR, p. 509]

Slothrop’s initial one-dimensional identity, to use Marcuse’s term,
has diffused into many avatars, until the point that he actually
starts disintegrating. This means that Slothrop, as a character, makes
a radical development from a synecdochically to a metaphorically
generated character, from a more or less coherent to a highly
incoherent one. In fact, this process goes so far that in the last
chapter of the book, it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine
Slothrop, as he loses his identity and becomes a living crossroads ...

[...]

... Slothrop is only presented to the reader through rumours in the
last chapter. This scattering and vanishing of the novel’s protagonist
mirrors the first images we get of Slothrop, not through rumours, but
through the description of his messy desk. In both cases, Slothrop is
not there, and the characterisation is second-hand and indirect, which
might add to confusion. Slothrop’s fate is indeed not very clear.
Whilst Shoeshine boy Malcolm X and Jack Kennedy got murdered, the
narrator suggests that “They [may] have something different in mind
for Slothrop.". Slothrop’s scattering (“he has become one plucked
albatross”) makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the
Counterforce to find him again, “in the conventional sense of
‘positively identified and detained.’”

Slothrop is no more. His disintegration, leading up to what appears to
be his final disguise, suggests that if there is a chance of freedom
in the Zone, you have to pay a price in order to obtain it. Slothrop’s
Promethean rebellion against Them has resulted in his own Fall. His
yearning for freedom has resulted in his own dissolution.... just when
he thinks he is able to overcome gravity, to transcend the limits of
nature, he starts scattering. The crossroads he has become can be read
as a metaphor of his supposed freedom. Slothrop can take many
different roads and has finally escaped both control and
comprehension...

[...]

http://gertvanlerberghe.blogspot.com/2013/05/from-cartoon-to-crossroads-tyrone.html

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it!" --Yogi Berra

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

keep in mind, to know any of this is one of a couple/three of the
biggest spoilers one can know about the book

On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 11:35 AM, Dave Monroe
<against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> From Cartoon to Crossroads:
> An Overview of Tyrone Slothrop’s Characterisation in Gravity’s Rainbow
>
> http://gertvanlerberghe.blogspot.com/2013/05/from-cartoon-to-crossroads-tyrone.html
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l