On Paths Unknown discussion

EDIT: This post mainly contains loose thoughts and comments about petty little observations in which I have tried to avoid any big spoilers. (except right at the bottom where I give an overall view of the novel which also doesn't really contain spoilers).

There are things that I have not discussed or brought up for the reason that it would spoil all the fun if read before you have finished the novel.. I will soon do a post with spoiler brackets that deal with issues towards the end of the novel.

Hmm, Jack doesn’t seem to be the brightest spark despite being a college professor – he can’t figure out his son’s simple statement about the fact that the cumulative count of people who have died over the course of history increases every day. It’s something that goes without saying, and kids do love to state the obvious, so of course Jack is overthinking it. Jack does seem to tend to be a bit of an 'overthinker' a person who ruminates a lot.

In the novel in general, the characters keep regurgitating information, but usually in an incorrect context - no doubt this is DeLillo’s form of critique on the glut of info that bombards us in the information age – to the extent that we cannot fully digest and contextualize it.

Chapter 35
Orest meant to say “Sunni” Muslim, of course, but DeLillo is obviously having fun with Suns and Moons. 😏

Babette’s been paying more attention to Wilder, but by her own admission, that’s because he makes her feel better.

Chapter 36
”I talked mainly about Hitler’s mother, brother and dog.” Could the world care less about Hitler’s mother, brother, and dog? Once again the focus is on the wrapper, the tinselly outer wrappings of a subject rather than the substance of it.

Chapter 37
” I only know I’m just going through the motions of living. I’m technically dead.”

Of course, the irony of the novel lies in the fact that with all of Jack’s obsessing about death, he’s letting life pass him by. Ironically he’s not living his life because of his obsession with death – he even compromised work satisfaction because of his obsession with death. (Gladney the narrator says he chose Hitler (Hitler as a man – not his politics) as a subject to try and counteract the fear of death.)

...and then we have Murray talking nonsense as usual… his argument that we could deal with the fear of our own death by killing other people which will increase our own chances of survival, seems counterintuitive.
Sure, kill someone and have their vengeful relatives come after you, (not to mention the law). And then kill all the relatives as well as the instruments of the law, and in the end you might as well kill all the rest of humanity and live happily ever after on a little island devoid of predators and replete with food and potable water. That makes HUGE sense. You’re gonna live forever that way…. I think it's mainly the nonsense that the characters keep spouting that makes me feel so weary while pushing through this…

…and if you wanted any further evidence of how Murray is a kind of “court jester” always coming up with anti-logic, here is a prime example: When Gladney asks him: “"But isn't repression unnatural?"
Murray replies: "Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural.(HUH?) Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive in the universe. This is the natural language of the species."
Ow, Murray, you make my brain hurt... yes, we may repress, but in my personal opinion you have too much time on your hands if you have time to ruminate about your impending doom, in any case - after all, one thing is certain, we are all going to die, but wasting time on our death, takes away just so much more time in which we could celebrate the fact of being alive!

Sidenote: I wonder if any marketing brands paid DeLillo to do all this brand namedropping for them?

Regarding Orest being bitten within 4 minutes, it’s a well-known fact among animal behaviourists and biologists that snakes only bite humans in self-defense. See https://rapidcityjournal.com/news/opi...

Also, it’s been bugging me for a long time, but especially in these last chapters, the way Babette speaks just sounds so unlike the way anybody would speak - no actual people speak like any of these characters do – it’s as if they’re reading a script out loud.

Ch. 39.
Willie Mink clearly represents the “Other”. He’s of unknown origin from outside America, Babette/Jack sees him as “Un-American”.

Ch 40
(view spoiler)[ Not surprised at all that Wilder was almost killed. As observed before, nobody looks after him. They didn’t even miss him after he’d ridden his tricycle around the entire block.
SMH.... (hide spoiler)]

In the end, for me, the novel represents a kind of striving to make sense of the nihilism inherent in the empty, materialistic culture that has developed especially in America, where everybody lies, even nuns, and the nuns do it with a contemptuous, knowing wink.
The novel also represents a screaming protest against the callous and careless greed of exploitacious individuals and corporations, and a government and authorities that seem to care more about image than about actual human lives.

I know this is an old novel, but all of the forerunners of our current lack of moral compass were already present back then, and if anything, it has intensified, with the difference that the current younger generations take this mode of being as a given, they don’t even kick against the stream anymore, and the desperate mockery seen in the literature of the time, such as can be found in White Noise, has become a part and parcel of our Information Age culture.

Scarily enough, today it is often the innocence of the past that tends to be mocked in a form of pseudo-sophistry often in the form of spoofing and lampooning cartoons.

That said, one aspect of pop culture that seems to have developed in a healthy direction since more acidic novels such as White Noise saw the light of day, is that current culture has refined techniques of self-referencing satire, self-mockery and metafiction, and satire has generally become more entertaining than this early and relatively clumsy attempt by DeLillo.

While the novel isn’t without value, especially in its depiction of the dangers of a combination of greed with science and technology, I did find the complete glut of factoids, half-truths and fake information rather overwhelming, but perhaps that was part of the entire point of the novel.

Traveller! your summaries, your commentary, your insights have saved me 10 chapters that I would rather spend on another book! A friend says you have to preserve and finish a book in
order to pass judgement but frankly I would forgo the latter.
Thanks so much for filling me in. Your insights and opinions are more than adequate... they're excellent! :)

Bonitaj wrote: "Traveller! your summaries, your commentary, your insights have saved me 10 chapters that I would rather spend on another book! A friend says you have to preserve and finish a book in
order to pass..."

Bonitaj, please tell me on which chapter you are, because there are a few bits you need to know to not make the whole effort of having read most of the book wasted. Ok, read the next spoiler in any case, because I think you already know what you need to know if you read chapter 30.

(view spoiler)[ Have you read the part where Babbette confesses to Jack what she did with Mr Gray? If you have, then click on the next spoiler! (hide spoiler)]

(view spoiler)[ So if you know now that one of the people from the pharma company basically misused Babette's fear of death to make her sleep with him, then skip to Chapter 39, and read it and maybe skim through Chapter 40.

Keep in mind what I said in my comments - that Murray Siskind, Jack's colleague, explained to him that in order to overcome the fear of death, you need to kill someone, because that is part of Jack's justification to find the guy who slept with his wife.

I do want you to read it first-hand though, I promise chapter 39 goes goes very quickly, and you can concentrate on the action, don't bother yourself with the silly things that Willie Mink has to say. A lot of the novel has nonsense to show how overwhelming all the bits of data we get from the media can be. I will add my explanations of what happens there in a following post. (hide spoiler)]

Ok, something that I haven't gone into detail about, is that Gray Research obviously represents Corporate America and in particular, Tech companies. If we've been reading our news regularly, we would already have an inkling that pharmaceutical companies are in it for the money, and often skip ethics in order to make more money. So, in the novel, enter Gray Research, which is obviously such a company and perhaps worse than most. Also note how 'Mr Gray' is a staticky grey composite of people, and therefore the perfect image to represent the leadership of such a corporation, who tend to be multiple and anonymous. The author even made the name (Gray) into a color which nicely describes their relative anonymity and how hard it is to define them and pin them down as something specific or "known".

Ok, so with that in mind, spoilers re chapter 39.
(view spoiler)[ Jack goes to kill Mr Gray, in order to defeat his own death and to gain out of it the Dylar tablets he wants to steal off Mr Gray. He really seems off his rocker at this point, but that has a function in the novel. He forgets that he had three bullets and thereby gives Willie the means to fire back at him. So his murder attempt failed, and "Big Tech" fired back at him and wounded him as well, which to me symbolizes the futility of us trying to fight against these people seeking to exploit us.

The part about the nun is extremely cynical, and seems to me to symbolize the "death of religion" where all that is left of religion, is merely an icon, a figurehead to morally prop people up.
(hide spoiler)]

Spoilers about chapter 40:
(view spoiler)[ I thought long and hard about what Wilder's function in the whole story would be, and then I suddenly remembered that somewhere in the novel, Jack had mentioned that Wilder was to young to know that he would one day die, and that Wilder was therefore a symbol to him of being, in my own words, because I don't remember the exact quote: "bulletproof against the fear of death." This is made clear by the fact that Wilder defies death by riding over the highway unscathed. Not too sure what the conclusion to that episode is supposed to be, but perhaps Jack got the message that it's no use to try and manipulate his own fear of death, that perhaps it's better to be oblivious to your own impending doom, since Wilder proved that to be fearless is to defy death. (Yes, that does sound like a dichotomy as well as tautology, doesn't it? 😜)

At the very end of the chapter, when they're watching the sunset, Jack says about it: It is hard to know how we should feel about this. Some people are scared by the sunsets, some determined to be elated, but most of us don't know how to feel, are ready to go either way. {...} What else do we feel? Certainly there is awe, it is all awe, it transcends previous categories of awe, but we don't know whether we are watching in wonder or dread, we don't know what we are watching or what it means, we don't know whether it is permanent, a level of experience to which we will gradually adjust, into which our uncertainty will eventually be absorbed, or just some atmospheric weirdness, soon to pass..." So he is kind of saying that they're ambivalent about the state of the world, they don't know if the way their current culture is, will eventually improve or if it spells bad news for them. Yeah, so basically he's "fading out" like they do at the ending of some movies, where the view moves out into a long shot and some narrator adds a little quip to show it's the end of the movie... 😏😆 (hide spoiler)]