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

[Mark Kohut]

Yes. To me this scene is the first overtly about Life Against Death. Pirate
sees a rocket on the way, knows he won't even hear it
if it hits him, so he decides to:

Pick Bananas. make a breakfast.

I have been reminded of this Buddhist parable about picking a strawberry,
about life within certain death:
http://endofthegame.net/2012/04/20/zen-story-the-tiger-and-the-strawberry.





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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