>Section 16Or the evensong section, where Roger and Jessica go to a church and a choir is singing there and the book retards and takes a broader look of the war and how it affects everyday life for everyone. And look, I love a 5 page 3 sentence section, and have been loving the book so far, much better than when I first had my go at it (with quite a few others between now and then), but this section was just so damn incoherent, I felt like I had two choices:1. Read at a slow pace for like an hour and wiki search every thing I don't understand, making the whole thing wholely unenhoyable or2. Just roll through the words and catch glimpses of the more vivid moments and play some disco elysium music to get in the feel of what he's conveying, but also feeling rather dumb and not gething 2/3rds of it...Obviously I picked the second one, but what were each of the sections in this part really? I realise their role in showing the war for the "global" and universal conflict it really is, but I can't make out all the individual anecdotes.
>>24778292the point is to affirm the transcendent reality of Christ
>>24778292Your impression is exactly correct. I don't remember the boundaries being difficult to see between the anecdotes. But toothpaste, and other items, are used as devices to show many things: war is universally felt (as you say), war commodifies, war is a black hole that sucks everything back into itself, etc.There are many sections of this book that are best experienced by resigning yourself to the sketch and trudging through it at an even tempo rather than trying to dissect five meanings out of each word.
>>24778338I'll return to it, see if I can get more out now that I'm past the initial impressions of it.
Rereading it now it definitely contains brief allusions to some of the overarching themes such as the contrast between white and black, alpha and omega. If you take "The War" to be a symbol within Pynchon's language, and I can't imagine not doing that (within this very fragment he alludes to its needs, wants, "resemblance to life"), this fragment itself is the song, a kind of stream of consciousness. Many voices sing it (points of view shift around at a fast pace.)I think there's a lot of imagery to dig into here, but a general piece of advice that helped me a lot is that the novel contains within itself many microcosms, as if it was trying to sum itself up within a few sentences with shifting sets of metaphors.
