Vineland [SEP] narrative location
Vineland
Vineland is a 1990 novel by Thomas Pynchon, a postmodern fiction set in California, United States in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan's reelection. Through flashbacks by its characters, who have lived the sixties in their youth, the story accounts for the free spirit of rebellion of that decade, and describes the traits of the "fascistic Nixonian repression" and its War on Drugs that clashed with it; and it articulates the slide and transformation that occurred in U.S. society from the 1960s to the 1980s.
weakening and dispiriting:
"Novels like Stephenson's, Condon's
"The Manchurian Candidate", and Pynchon's "Vineland" are novels not of social protest but rather of rueful acquiescence in the end of American hopes."
The second narrative is equally dispiriting but for a different reason; Leftist literature often focuses on what
is wrong with America and where there is hypocrisy and actions at odds with avowed ideals, so "When young intellectuals watch John Wayne war movies after reading Heidegger, Foucault, Stephenson,