Fiedler & Grace they fly from "guilt, the guilt of that very flight"

[ish mailian]

The enemy of society on the run toward "freedom" is also the pariah in
flight from his guilt, the guilt of that very flight; and new phantoms
arise to haunt him at every step. American literature likes to
pretend, of course, that its bugaboos are all finally jokes: the
headless horseman a hoax, every manifestation of the supernatural
capable of rational explanation on the last page—but we are never
quite convinced. Huckleberry Finn, that euphoric boys' book, begins
with its protagonist holding off at gun point his father driven half
mad by the D.T.'s and ends (after a lynching, a disinterment, and a
series of violent deaths relieved by such humorous incidents as
soaking a dog in kerosene and setting him on fire) with the revelation
of that father's sordid death. Nothing is spared; Pap, horrible enough
in life, is found murdered brutally, abandoned to float down the river
in a decaying house scrawled with obscenities. But it is all "humor,"
of course, a last desperate attempt to convince us of the innocence of
violence, the good clean fun of horror. Our literature as a whole at
times seems a chamber of horrors disguised as an amusement park "fun
house," where we pay to play at terror and are confronted in the
innermost chamber with a series of inter-reflecting mirrors which
present us with a thousand versions of our own face.
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l