"Escaped!"
* * * * * * * * * *
I believe, cheating and looking ahead at the next few lines, this was said by Ed Addle who Merle just recently helped escape Newburgh. I did not skip any lines, I assure you, no matter how much it seems like I skipped some lines. It's just how Pynchon writes! He'll be writing some bit of linear mundanity that you've convinced yourself you're following like a grade-A Mensa member (although your anxiety keeps piping up insisting that if it seems so easy to understand, you must be missing something) and then BLAMMO! Pynchon switches camera angles while spinning you around five times and kicking you in the nethers. At that point, you stagger forward trying to piece together the narrative to the best of your ability. He does this so well in Gravity's Rainbow that I had to re-read pages and pages of text once I realized the narrative had returned to the present while I thought we were still in a flashback. And being a reasonable person who wants to make sure the time I spent reading something while I could have been having sex wasn't entirely wasted, and even though I understood everything I read, I would have to go back and re-read the entire passage until I understood where I missed the move from flashback back to the present. Or from hallucination to reality. Or from story about a sentient light bulb to the light bulb not being sentient anymore.
This bit in Against the Day isn't exactly that. It's just Pynchon writing, "Sometimes Merle had to help inmates escape. Now I'll just go into an example of the aftermath of Merle having helped somebody escape. And it would be boring to explain what I'm doing so I'll just do it and the reader can figure it out themselves. Or not. What do I care? They already paid for my fat-ass book!"
Getting ahead of this line a bit, as I noted, Ed Addle says it. But I don't know if it's Ed who has escaped or if Ed is exclaiming, "Escaped!", because Merle just brought an escapee into the Oil Well Saloon, or, even, if it matters at all. Reading a few lines further ahead, I'm sure it's Ed. Besides, Ed's name is "Addle" which means "confused". Seems the type to get thrown into Newburgh!
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