>A screaming comes across the sky.
then 2 pages later:
>Screaming holds across the sky.
What is the screaming? Humans? Sirens?
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>A screaming comes across the sky.
>A screaming comes across the sky.
then 2 pages later:
>Screaming holds across the sky.
What is the screaming? Humans? Sirens?
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air raid sirens but also v2 rockets but also trauma in a more general sense
I can believe the air raid sirens, but how do you know this?
He's so specific about the sounds of the v2 that it's def not that.
it becomes more clear in the final scene, i dont want to spoil it if you have only just started
Don't worry about spoilers, I have the book next to me here, which part of the last scene?
the integration of gottfried the sexual abuse victim with the rocket itself; screaming: truama, comes: sexual abuse, across the sky: rockets, symbol for the "higher purpose" to which people are sacrificed
because it's not really about that specifically, it's about how people are instrumentalized by greater powers beyond their understanding, and the traumas inflicted upon them in the process; it's told in a deliberately frustrating and oblique way in order to situate the perspective inside the subject matter
>abuse
I thought he was voluntarily part of it like Katje?
this is an ambiguous concept in the novel considering how slothrop's perfectly voluntary sexual escapades are revealed to be an echo of the sick experiments performed on him as a child, calling into question the concept of personal volition versus an unconsciously determined outcome
uuhhh so it's something you're bringing to the text, not something in the text
that would be a reasonable interpretation if you ignored the references to the text
Not OP but damn you are on a high level. I'm pretty enthusiastic about GR but your breakdown of that first sentence is something. I feel like an idiot for not considering trauma as a major theme.
>"First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control?"
There it is then. The epigraphs to each section seem to fit as well, each one is about or by a person who was used or was a tool for somebody else. Von Braun in paperclip, the actress in King Kong, Nixon by deep state types, even the Joni Mitchell one he removed is about someone seeking freedom from control.
i think it also contextualizes what finally ends up happening to slothrop, in one sense we can see it as him having a breakdown after everything he's been subjected to and going off the grid, but on the other hand it's a bit of triumph in that by exiting the narrative he also ends his instrumentalization by all the forces and conspiracies greater than him. he goes into the woods aimlessly playing a harmonica and no one can find him; in one sense he's devolved into some kind of lunatic but in another sense, he's finally free and living for himself
rereading a book immediately after finishing it is boring as frick but really does allow for a much wider understanding of the text (and more impressive interpretations). highly recommend if you have an embarassing amount of time to kill
a missile you fricking idiot, do you not know what jet engines sound like overhead? It sounds like an extremely deep screaming. Watch footage of the air and water show to better understand
>do you not know what jet engines sound like overhead
I do, it's actually available on youtube.
>It sounds like an extremely deep screaming
No.
>Watch footage of the air and water show to better understand
Been to them. Sorry. Unless you have a clip, I mean I can be convinced, but it seems the least likely.
What an idiotic post.
Why couldn't this be a simple historical novel regarding the development and deployment of the V-weapons?
>Why couldn't this be a simple historical novel regarding the development and deployment of the V-weapons?
I like that there are people who pretend to have read it who think it is that
https://nitter.net/L0m3z/status/1535619355001737219
It is
As with many great books, a certain amount of ambiguity adds to artfulness of it. It could be all the things you mentioned. The reversal of cause/effect is IMO a core theme of GR, and its most plainly personified in the V2.
The dead who are killed by it don't hear the V2, because it's faster than the speed of sound. The sound comes after. Its silent, and even though a missile that you can hear is still probably traveling too quickly for the hearing to do you any good, there is some solace felt in the idea that you can hear it and duck or hide under your desk or jump out the window or some shit. I think of the V2 is like the angel of death in the biblical passover story, it takes its victims like a ghost, without warning. Slothrope keeps being lucky over and over, like God's chosen, and he starts to get fearful and paranoid that eventually the scales have to balance, that's why he imagines a V2 "with his name on it."
In the first section those civilians in that train station or structure (whatever it was, I can't quite remember), are referred to as "preterite" and "lost sheep." They are the ones that won't be saved. The screaming across the sky could be interpreted as them surviving, because the survivors are the ones who hear the delayed sound of it coming in, but with the theme of the reversal of cause and effect I think it means, The sound is here, that means the rocket has already landed, you are already fricked. You are already dead. "You didn't really think anyone would save you, old boy, come now, we all know who we really are." Or whatever that line was in his dream, it was something like that.
sexuality is tightly linked to trauma throughout the entire book, it's treated as soemthing that emerges from trauma, something that inflicts trauma, and something that represents movement towards a goal beyond the lives of the participants who are instrumentalized in service to it, like the rocket program or the pavlovian conditioning research
>a sneed breeds across the sky
>A chuck sneeds across the sky.
personally i find "sneeding across the sky" much funnier even though I don't know what that is. Sneed is obviously a verb of uncertain meaning.
Sirens.
Ok why?
why not?
uh uh uh uh uh uh uh
A further ambiguity in the text is revealed when we remember the V-2 is not heard until after impact. Cause and effect therefore in a crisis, as another anon said. We can take this further, also: the air raid sirens, which are supposed to warn for the incoming rockets, really are “all theater” in the sense that they come after what they are supposed to warn for. The warning comes after it is too late; the warning is, therefore, made into a parody of itself. It does no work and makes a joke of working.
very cool point
I always thought it was a premonition dream about or from Bloat
He confirmed this in a letter. It's the screaming of the people in London looking up and seeing the bomb coming. They're screaming really loud because they're really scared about the bomb, and it's so loud it seems to fill the sky.
I can believe this. Do you have the source? Even half remembered? I'll hunt it down and post it if you don't feel like it.
I think this is most likely, unless the above points me to the letter. Calling it theater right after, and taking in later contexts, seems to be correct. So. Next question for you: what is the 3rd paragraph?
>Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage’s frame, a poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered images in a view finder, green-stained VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city. . .
Specifically: Only the nearer faces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered images in a view finder, green-stained VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city...
v2 rockets weren't even a big deal, the war was already lost years before they were implemented.
huh?