Serious, Solemn, Satiric, Hopeless, Happiness

[Mark Kohut]

Sometimes when one has been away from ones computer and reading
posts on one's phone, those posts seem be lost when one sits
back down at the computer....caught in Icloud or somewhere.....

So, I cannot find Dr, Krafft's post related to Miller's epigram but I hope
I remember its
thrust as an argument and major words. Serious, solemn and satirical.

Although I could not articulate the paragraph Dr. Krafft wrote as well as
he did, I think
it expressed the way I read the story too. Tom IS satirizing these
characters. One might say
he is satirizing their seriousness, their solemnity?

The first time I attempted to read *V,* still early in college but not in a
class--that copy recently unearthed, the Modern Library edition
with my bookmark still in it--I stopped at the party scene with the Whole
Sick Crew in the bar with a pool table, etc. One used "a little too much
force"
as Dylan wrote, on what's her name.....I stopped reading because I thought
I was
to identify closely with The Whole Sick Crew. I came to understand
otherwise, which the phrase 'sick crew' should
have clued me in on earlier, I think.

When I read* Entropy, *much later in time, I read the characters I think in
the way Dr. Krafft has described.
Describing the characters of that party as like the heat death of the
universe, while we know entropy is
overcome on this earth with every action we take, is to say these
characters are dead--to human life; to human
engagement; to human energy.

To the plister who wrote one can't be happy with such expressed
hopelesssness, I think Tom might have
thought the same thing. That Miller's surprising paradox is not 'earned" as
Dr. Leavis might say. Which is
why Tom left it off the epigraph and is what the story is "about"....

PS. I get Tom's later life criticism of 'starting with an idea first" but
since I like ideas, esp Tom's, I still like
this story for the way it works atmospherically, to pun ideationally.