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« on: February 20, 2015, 03:36:18 am »
[EDIT Madness: Title changed]
Obviously, major spoilers.
The twist ending of Light, Time, and Gravity completely changes the reader's perception of everything Dylan had to say up to that point. One thread that I became skeptical about is his depiction of Cutter. Almost from the beginning, Dylan explicitly paints him as a sociopath and I initially expected this to manifest in some dramatic, violent way, after the intro vaguely references that he is connected with a crime. Time and again, the narrator returns to this characterization, both when Cutter is in a scene (by highlighting his behavior) and even when he is off-screen (via analogies, such as the Canadian elections passage). It occurred to me that this might just have been Dylan's way of rationalizing the fact that he ultimately murdered Cutter on a whim.
While he's no doubt a scumbag, it's hard to say whether Cutter actually ever crosses the line of typical alpha-male nonsense and steps into sociopath territory. He didn't react at all in the way Dylan was certain he would when Dylan beat him at arm-wrestling. His eventual decision to tell Jerry about the affair is something I think a lot of us would do in his position, and he indeed says he told Jerry because of their friendship. He tells this to Dylan like it was something that should be obvious but Dylan immediately disbelieves him, attributing it instead to Cutter's need to create drama.
Does Dylan's constant cynicism regarding human connections suggest that Dylan is actually the sociopath? This kinda ties into the BBT-esque cognitive science rants, where the protagonist aggressively challenges belief in meaning, despite desperately longing for it in other passages. I wonder if this book was in part Bakker poking fun at and taking himself less seriously, as he often emphasizes on his blog that he knows he is not above his observations on human shortcomings. In Light, Time, and Gravity, we have a protagonist who embodies just how true that is.
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