"Cheerly now . . . handsomely . . . very well! Prepare to cast her off!"
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I know what you're thinking! If only you had three sets of handcuffs and a bottle of vodka, your weekend would be set! No wait! That's what I'm thinking. You're thinking, "But Anonymous Blogger Person! That was two lines! What are you? Stupider than I first thought (which was pretty stupid)?!"
Now, I can't say that I'm not stupider than you first thought. That's a philosophical conundrum. But what I can do is explain myself. I don't normally set rules in my life which probably explains some things I'd rather not discuss in a public forum. But early on, I decided I should probably treat sentences within one set of quotations as a single sentence. This, like everything in life, is not a hard and fast rule. The only hard and fast rule I live by is "If you touch it, I will love you forever." Every other rule must be judged by the variables and context of the situation. People often think precedents in law help keep everything fair, so that everybody is judged by the same standard. But often precedents ensure that everything is not fair at all in any way. Life is complicated and we should never treat one situation as if it were identical to a previous situation with some of the same variables.
What was I talking about? Oh yeah! I will be presenting more than one sentence at times but almost exclusively if it's within the same set of quotation marks. Partly because I don't want fifteen hundred entries where I discuss what Pynchon was thinking when he had that character say, "Hello." Or "Yes." Or "Hallelujah!" If you're not as flexible as I am, you might get angry at some of my arbitrary decisions. Also did you notice how I avoided the obvious sex joke about how flexible I am?!
"Cheerly now . . . handsomely . . . very well!"
So the first sentence must be Pynchon telling me how to read every line. He's asking me, "Please, be kind, buddy." Or he's just cheering on my efforts, maybe! I bet Pynchon is way too confident to think, "I need to beg for the reader to enjoy my work which I enjoy immensely since it's totally been written for my own amusement." He's probably just thinking, "Come on! You can do it! That's it!" Or, if I had to get into Pynchon's mind to think exactly how he'd phrase it, "Cheerly now . . . handsomely . . . very well!"
"Prepare to cast her off!"
The second sentence is exactly what it is. "Here we go!" It's exactly how all books should begin! Instead of "Call me Ishmael," it should have been, "Prepare to cast her off! You can call me Ishmael." Or, a better example (or can there even be a better example being that Moby Dick was also about sailors and ships?), "Prepare to cast her off! A screaming comes across the sky."
Oh! Maybe "A screaming comes across the sky" is Gravity's Rainbow's "Prepare to cast her off!" It's sort of the written opening line version of throwing a Pynchon book at some jerk's head. "Hey! Read this, jerko!"
That's a pretty good opening line too, right?! I should get to work on my new novel!
