From "Under the Rose" to V.: A Linguistic Approach to Human Agency in Pynchon's Fiction

This study investigates linguistic differences between two fictional narrative texts—one a revision of the other—by Thomas Pynchon. New syntactic and lexical choices made by Pynchon when rewriting his early short story "Under the Rose" as chapter 3 in the novel V. are analyzed in the light of the changes they bring about in the transitivity of the clause and consequently in the reader's conceptualizing of the fictional world, especially the characters. The analysis is grounded on cognitive theories of information processing, and on the assumption that language form is not fortuitous, but performs a communicative function.