Pirate's Unique Skill

[J K Van Nort]

There remains the mixture/blending of dreams and reality. Prentice as a fantasist-surrogate resides in both. He joins and occupies the fantasies of others. He comes  back down from the roof into the slumbering roommates and invades their fantasies where they are ‘drooling of a banana breakfast’. After his breakfast is served, Prentice barely has time to enjoy a mug of mead before the phone rings for him. He doesn’t even get to do ‘me pushups’ before being summoned to Greenwich to receive the message delivered by the V-2 rocket. The hanging up on the other end of the call provides the ‘violent whack’ that arrives after the rocket. He is driven by ‘Corporal Wayne’, his batman, out to Greenwich in a Laconda, a high end British convertible. After passing a group of singing sappers, he falls into his ‘fantasy-surrogate mode, which he attempts to control with his own mental song and dance. So the initial dream/fantasy before he wakes of the first section may not be his own. The ‘exiled Rumanian Royalist’ whose fantasy he enters is among the Elite. Pirate begins humming a tune they taught him to remind himself to ’not fuck it up’.  We get the first verse of the tune with lyrics implying this fantasy-surrogate skill is killing him. Pynchon describes this mental state as fantasies swirling in and out of Pirate’s theater of a mind.  We then get a history of Pirate’s development into the fantasist-surrogate. We learn how Prentice confirmed that they were others’ fantasies, when he witnessed a derelict, luridly observing two young girls, looked over at Prentice and said something right out of one of Prentice’s dreams. After this among a ‘usual list of prizes in a competition grown crowded and perilous’ Prentice fantasizes about being abducted and his unique ability used for ‘unspeakable purposes’. Prentice’s episodes also begin to occur ‘outside any conditions of sleep’ with H.A. Loaf’s messianic fantasy, during this revelation Pynchon also brings in Kipling and racist imagery of colonial empire’s victims, also the hardships of the soldiers of the empire. The dark forces he fears will abduct him manifest when he confirms the fantasy with Loaf, and ‘They’, ‘The White Visitation’, ‘Higher Echelons’, the ‘anonymous voices in a briefing room’ become aware of his ability. Here is the first clear example of paranoia: each term implies an amorphous elite of puppet masters, omnisciently seeking ‘negotiable skills’ and omnipotent control of the Preterite. The Elect exploits Pirate, a Preterite, for their benefit. These Elect are in ‘the Long Game’ implying the Elect’s permanence over its individual members. They patiently study him, ‘committed to the Long Run’, until his skill becomes useful, namely with one Lord Blatheral Osmo, like the Rumanian, a member of the Elite. Osmo is in charge of the Novi Pazar desk important to the control of the Balkans. Osmo’s removed adenoid is now swallowing London in his nightmares, much like ‘the Firm’ assimilates individuals like Prentice, or the war subsumes everyone into its meaningless blob. Prentice must take on this adenoid and allow Osmo to sleep, keeping him ‘able to at last devote all his time to Novi Pazar’. By the end of the section, Prentice has saved “Europe from the Balkan Armageddon the old men dreamed of”, another paranoid reference to the Elite and their dreams of “grandeur” fulfilled by WWII.  Pirate nearly loses his mind and ‘The Firm’ allows him ‘tiny homeopathic doses of peace’ to keep him ready for more. Pirate’s separation, his being among and yet apart from those around him, and his unique skill allow several themes to emerge: dream/reality, isolation, the controlling ‘they’/’them’ labeled 'The Firm’, and ‘The White Visitation’; paranoia and insanity.