“V.” by Thomas Pynchon (post 3): Herbert Stencil’s Illeism (third-person self reference) and the novel’s multiple narratives are due to multiple personality.

The Epilogue is about the last days of Herbert Stencil’s father, Sydney Stencil, who is involved with a woman whose name starts with “V.”

But what I found most interesting, even startling, about the epilogue is the sudden appearance of a character named Stencil (the father) who refers to himself in the first person. Previously, throughout the novel, Herbert Stencil had always and unerringly referred to himself in the third person (which you could probably not do, no matter how hard you tried).

The reader has not been told at what age Herbert started to refer to himself in the third person, but the reader is told that he had experienced a change in personality at age 38: “it was as if a stranger, located above the frontiers of consciousness, were shaking him” (1, p. 43).

Moreover, to sustain his new “animateness,” “he had to hunt V,” because if he didn’t, he would go “back into half-consciousness” (1, p. 44); that is, revert to his previous personality.

So what is the search for “V”? It is the animating preoccupation of an alternate personality, who is called “a stranger,” probably because he did not identify with the regular personality or call himself “Herbert Stencil” (and so would refer to the latter as someone else, by using the third person).

In addition to Herbert Stencil’s illeism (third-person self-reference), the other unusual feature of this novel is that it seems less like one novel, and more like several novellas, which I guess is due to Pynchon’s having several narrative personalities.

1. Thomas Pynchon. V. [1963]. New York, Bantam Books, 1984.