Modern Parallels

Despite Mr. Pynchon's insistence to the contrary in the original dust jacket copy -- "No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred" -- the reader of Against the Day cannot, of course, help but draw parallels between its text and the events, political philosophies, and social inequalities of the present day.

With the introduction of the Webb Traverse storyline, the reader begins to encounter strong, direct references to modern time. Webb considers the possibility that doing physical harm to the infrastructure of wealth might backfire, thinking, "Not that any owner ever cared rat shit about the lives of workers, of course, except to define them as Innocent Victims in whose name uniformed goons could then go out and hunt down the Monsters That Did the Deed" (p85). September 11, 2001 and the United States of America's response -- more specifically, the response of the "owners"/plutocrats -- to the events of that day lurk within this sentence. A paragraph later, the reader encounters a reference to that darkest of conspiracy theories concerning September 11: "...some of these explosions, the more deadly of them, in fact, were really set off to begin with not by Anarchists but by the owners themselves" (p85). Webb is philosophically sickened by the prospect of the owners/government as agent provocateur, spreading destruction from within, using his sacred truth medium, "nitro", to slander his cause. Soon, we find Webb advising his children against the disingenuous semantics of the plutocrats (p93). Webb chooses "Freedom", "Reform", and "Compassion" as prime examples of their euphemisms, which echo Operation Iraqi Freedom, "Freedom's on the march", immigration reform, and compassionate conservatism.

Perhaps what makes the presence of these parallels especially uncomforable to an American reader is the fact that the story, at this point at least, is focused on domestic terrorists. That "darker thing", "the desire, the desperate need to create a radius of annihilation that, if it could not include the ones who deserved it, might as well include himself" (p95) might first be identified as the thought of a September 11 hijacker or a suicide bomber of any foreign stripe. But, here, we are dealing with the dark thoughts of an American boy, Reef Traverse...