"He's wasted gallons of paint thinner striking his faithful Zippo...just to see what's happening with her face. Each new flame, a new face(39)". What I found really interesting about this first chunk of the novel were the changes of perspective and how Pynchon went about it. Even after acclimating to the dense prose and overriding bewilderment, I felt that reading the novel was an experience close to Roger Mexico's in the quote above only that Pynchon rationed the character development of his entire cast instead of just one person.

One theme I thought I kept seeing was that for all its glorification in the mind of the average 20th century character, science and cold reason does not do much to improve the characters' lives, but ironically contributes to the overall dreariness of it. We know something is off about Pointsman from start, but his "creepy" quality is really instilled and gradually built up with elaboration on his Pavlovian beliefs. Even with a real-life situation that matches exactly a textbook statistical model, Roger can agonize, but can't do anything to predict the direction of a given night's blitzkrieg.

I don't know if this is means anything in the context of the novel, but I found this on adenoids: "because adenoids do ordinarily shrink by late childhood, the problems caused by enlarged adenoids rarely occur in adults."