Pirate Prentice continued: upper class envy and paranoia turned inward

[J Tracy]

Pirate feels himself floundering and isolated in the atmosphere of intra-intel mistrust among officers( the expert in paranoia foiled by paranoia),  and despite his slightly higher status seems to act only as a go between of Bloat's spy information onTyrone Slothrop merely passing it to Mexico and on to the higher echelons. 
               “Pirate wonders if Mexico isn’t into yet another of the thousand dodgy intra-Allied surveillance schemes that have sprung up about London 
                since the Americans, and a dozen governments in exile, moved in. In which the German curiously fades into irrelevance.”
We glimpse PP’s humanity as he sees the love between Roger Mexico and his beloved Jessica
            “He is suddenly, dodderer and asks, taken by an ache in his skin, a simple love for them both that asks nothing but their safety, and that he’ll 
              always manage to describe as something else—“concern,” you know, “fondness. . . .” 
He is reminded of an affair with Scorpia Mossmoon and her unbreakable connection to a rich husband despite her intense passion for him. We glimpse again and again his longing to enter that world of the upper class.

Pg 64  PP brings Intel of Hereros involvement in secret weapons program in Nazi Germany. No clear indication of entering fantasy life to get the information, though one interpretation of the novel that makes weir sense is that all the events are narrated by Pirate Prentice, the ultimate inhabiter of illuminating fantasies.And therefor that Pynchon sees some relation between piracy and fiction.

He plays a role in bringing Katje Borgesius out of Holland and sending her to the white Visitation, where he later shows an interest in her  ( sexual? Romantic? Possibility of getting critical information ).

He slowly becomes inhabited by or inhabits  Katje’s ancestor Franz Vander Groov who killed all the Dodos on Mauritius. Suspects it has some connection to the Firm. Again if PP is Pynchon his delight in sympathy with mass killing could be seen in his describing ,with a twisted sense of humor, Nuclear war as human destiny.

Toward the end of the novel Pirate joins the counterforce out of deep bitterness with the FIrme etc.. He is still in search of Katie and when they meet they kind of absolve each other in their shared shame , attraction, and perception of the impossible desirability of love. 




What Pynchon knew about the CIA/military intel/and private institutions which were investigating telepathy, remote viewing, and other dimensions of paranormal psychiic abilities is hard to say, but it is the kind of thing that he is curious about and that shows up throughout his fiction. That such a unit is central to GR has not in my reading led many to the possible parallels of research and  the use of psy abilities that were closer to the period in which Pyncon’s own life and immediate social concerns live. This field also connects in its military investigation to UFOs, Foo fighters, nukes and hence Von Braun.