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/lit/ - Literature

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8500248 No.8500248 [Reply] [Original]

So my take after an initial reading is humanity has become obsessed with death and extinction. Much like the Empty Ones of the Herero. So naturally they devise a bomb that will bring about the end of humanity. This why when the 00000 is launched a human must be inside. Humanity must be sacrificed in order for this creation to exist. But then there's Slothrop. This is where I get confused. He's the only thing that can stop this? Hence his search for the bomb. But in the end he ceases to exist? Perhaps isn't even real? But just a common belief in the human race that maybe they have a chance to stop their extinction?

I definitely need to read this again. Or perhaps I'm just a pseud trying to make sense out of nothing.

>> No.8500505

>>8500248
Killing people just gives them sexual pleasure.
>This why when the 00000 is launched a human must be inside
He puts his sex slave inside
>He's the only thing that can stop this? Hence his search for the bomb.
He can't. He was just experimented on as a child and is just trying to find out why.

>> No.8500520

>>8500248
>humanity has become
No, they always were

>> No.8500565

Wait is Byron the light bulb an allegory for Slothrop?

>> No.8502541

>>8500565
Yes, you're thinking on the right track. Pynchon uses to archetypal struggle in this book between the profane (think Benny Profane) and enlightened, or, in Calvinist terms, preterite and elect, those who are in the know and those who aren't. "Preterite" characters show up again and again, Slothrop seems to be an embodiment of the preterite person in the modern world trying to find out what forces shaped them to become who they were. Also the struggle between freewill and determinism, those who can choose and those who have their lives chosen for them.

So pretty much yes, although Slothrop himself is an allegory for the preterite, everything in the book in a sense is an allegory of the preterite and for the preterite.

>> No.8502552
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8502552

>>8500248
He dissipates into a bunch of different people... Remember the barber going nuts? 100th monkey stuff, mannn. He's in all of huzz.

>> No.8502571

>>8500248
the 00000 wasn't an apocalypse bomb though