How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
San Narciso was a name, an incident among our climactic records of dreams and what dreams became among our accumulated daylight, a moment's squall-line or tornado's touchdown among the higher, more continental solemnities—storm-systems of group suffering and need, prevailing winds of affluence. There was the true continuity, San Narciso had no boundaries. No one knew yet how to draw them. She had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was America. (6.144)
How is Oedipa moving away from the obsession with the Tristero conspiracy here? Does her sense of compassion for the American dispossessed seem new? What do you make of her characterization of the American population: "storm-systems of group suffering and need"?
Quote #8
What was left to inherit? That America coded in Inverarity's testament, whose was that? (6.147)
How does Inverarity's will "encode" a vision of America? What vision of America is Oedipa trying to articulate here, and what is its relationship to the Tristero? How important is the idea of inheritance to our American vision?
Quote #9
For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia. (6.148)
Why would the existence of Tristero keep Oedipa from feeling like "an alien"? What causes Oedipa to feel so distanced from mainstream America? To what extent is her sense of alienation a product of the 1960s? Is this paranoid vision of America still relevant today?