V. Literary Elements

Postmodern literature, Satire

1950s New York City, U.S; w/ historical flashbacks spanning the 20th century

Close third-person, focalizing separate characters across chapters

Playful, sardonic, "smart-ass" tone

Benny Profane, Herbert Stencil, and V.

For Benny Profane: the tug of the yo-yo; For Herbert Stencil: the search for V.

Arrival in Malta––where Herbert Stencil expects to find V.

Pynchon leaves scatterings of breadcrumbs and clues to foreshadow larger plot elements in V.'s historical narratives, and Herbert's investigation: including Sidney's death in Valletta, Victoria's ivory comb, and the "glowing" alligator Profane shoots.

“Allowing for natural causes during those unnatural years, von Trotha, who stayed for only one of them, is reckoned to have done away with about 60,000 people. This is only 1 percent of six million, but still pretty good” (p. 245).

The novel contains many allusions and references, among them the travel guides of Karl Baedeker, the jazz performances of Ornette Coleman, the political philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli, and more.

The novel has vivid, kinetic, often humorous, but sometimes cruel, imagery and details. For example, take the opening scene, set in a seaside tavern, where Navy sailors drink from beer taps, rubber molded in the shape of breasts: "Ploy, hands outstretched, was propelled over the top. He caught on to one of the tap handles and simultaneously his shipmates let go; his momentum carried him and the handle in a downward arc: beer began to gush from the foam rubber breast in a white cascade, washing over Ploy, Mrs. Buffo and two dozen sailors who had come around behind the bar in a flanking action and who were now battering one another into insensibility" (p. 16).

The search for V. is made a paradox throughout the novel; V. contains many meanings, and yet no meanings. For example, when asked why he is looking for V., Herbert Stencil responds, “Why not? […] His giving you any clear reason would mean he'd already found her. Why does one decide to pick up one girl in a bar over another. If one knew why, she would never be a problem. Why do wars start: if one knew why there would be eternal peace. So in this search the motive is part of the quarry" (p. 386)

Protagonists Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil might be seen as foils: the first lacking a life purpose, the second having an obsessive life purpose.

Metonymy, in a meta-form, is often present in Pynchon's character names, from Navy sailors Fat Clyde and Pig Bodine, to Dr. Eigenvalue, whose name is a reference to the "eigenvalues" of linear algebra, or even to Herbert Stencil and Benny Profane—whose surnames perhaps give insight into the two protagonists' character traits: Stencil as someone who traces, and Profane as someone vulgar.

“Chief reason being that no one in the city knew if he'd be alive or well come next Fasching. Any windfall—food, firewood, coal—was consumed as quickly as possible. Why hoard, why ration? Depression hung in the gray strata of clouds, looked at you out of faces waiting in bread queues and dehumanized by the bitter cold. Depression stalked the Liebigstrasse, where Mondaugen had had an attic room in a mansarde: a figure with an old woman's face, bent against the wind off the Isar and wrapped tightly in a frayed black coat; who might, like some angel of death, mark in pink spittle the doorsteps of those who'd starve tomorrow" (p. 243). In this quote, the faces are "dehumanized," but the inhuman, Depression, is made human—capable of "stalk[ing]" and "look[ing] out."