Against The Day

A number of segments in the narrative arc use literary styles, authors, and books to afford Pynchon a variety of voices and scenes. There are Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing (Merle Rideout), Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Lew Basknight, the TWIT Tarot episode), Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (Kit as Frodo or Bilbo?), William Gibson, Tom Wolfe, Proust, and comics, including Little Nemo, Tintin, V for Vendetta, and others. A similar narrative doubling occurs with his use of film. There are Monty Python’s Holy Grail and Life of Brian, Fawlty Towers, Star Wars, the Matrix, Fritz Lang, Fellini, John Woo, and numerous Terry Gilliamesque animations.

Lewis Carroll, represented perhaps as Lew Basknight (Bas = Car, transposition)/(Knight = Through the looking glass) seems to me to have inspired the style of our first important encounter with the T.W.I.T.s., pages 220 - 227, including numerous references to strange physical laws, a pig of a baby (”scarcely a year old and already four stone, that form of gluttony known to students of the condition as gaver du visage” — 225).