C'est Magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre

[Mark Kohut]

And, without trying, he is a Pirate of others' dreams and, as Monte wrote
earlier,  an (ap)prentice of it all.

On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 8:10 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> For all Pirate's implication in SOE's (and Others') manipulative plots,
> and for all he conceals from Slothrop (as even Tantivy does), he's a decent
> sort. His first waking act in the book is to spare Teddy Bloat a hard
> landing, and his last real-time appearance (637-639) is encouraging: "In
> Pirate’s maisonette, everyone is singing now a counterforce traveling
> song... 'it isn't a resistance, it's a war'"]
>
> On the Pynchon's Wacky Names front, "Pirate" would have been a natural
> public-school-boys' nickname in that Gilbert & Sullivan-soaked era for
> anyone surnamed "Prentice." But there may be a little more to it -- some
> carry-over of Frederic's comically exaggerated attachment to Duty and Honor
> amid the cutthroats and outcasts.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance
>
> On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 11:04 PM, gary webb <gwebb8686 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> After the more surreal introduction, where death, holocaust, war,
>> evacuation are all inter-meshed... the players dust themselves off the
>> floor and get back to their organized death rituals... but not before they
>> have their reprieve... a la Pirate Prentice's Banana Breakfast...
>>
>> In this section we get to know Prentice, a sort-of character that could
>> have doubled in a Graham Greene novel... It would be interesting to know
>> what the group as a whole thinks of Pirate Prentice?
>>
>> There is something redemptive about this coming together, as in many of
>> Pynchon's work, he can find some redeeming qualities inevitable in
>> entropy...
>>
>>
>>
>
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