I thought it was really interesting how DeLillo explicity connects Sister Edgar and J. Edgar Hoover as "Sister and Brother. A fantasy in cyberspace and a way of seeing the other side and a settling of differences that have less to do with gender than with difference itself, all argument, all conflict programmed out." Both characters exist in insular worlds without outside contact, yet cyberspace ultimately links them together albeit as only a "single fluctuating impulse now, a piece of coded information" (826). I'm not entirely sure as to what DeLillo means, but the ending seems very ambivalent, maybe intentionally so in order to mirror the increasing lack of a divide between what he calls cyberspace and the world.

This is partly in response to the "Maybe?" post from below, as well as a continuation of a thread from class on Monday. I don't know about the east-west / modern-postmodern parralel regarding Matt and Nick, but I think it'ss quite useful for unpacking the differences between Nick and Klara. Both moved westward from New York (allegorically, from modernity to postmodernity), but the two have reacted to the shifts in very different ways. The seeds of this theme are planted early. During their first encounter after so long, Klara wonders if life didn't "take an unreal turn at some point;" and "becasue [she's] famous," but because "it's just unreal" (73), to which Nick responds in swiftly modern judgment: "I lived responsibly in the real.

Even though I still find Pynchon to be incredibly convoluted, there are places in the text that I think are beautiful, that make the next page or so easier to read. "What I can do for the Schwarzkommando I can do for your dream of pampas and sky....I can take down your fences and your labyrinth walls, I can lead you back to the Garden you hardly remember...."(394).

This section dealing with the U-boat exiles and Springer's cinematic ambition seemed more transparent in conveying its themes than other parts of the novel, something I was more than slightly thankful for. I thought Pynchon took the hopeless/battered Argentine cause to illustrate the obvious futility of inaction and facade.