The chapter is also described as a 'detour' 'from the Revd's narrative Turnpike onto the pleasant Track of their own mutual Fascination, by way of the Captive's Tale' (529).

Chapter 54 appears to be comprised of excerpts from this narrative (in first- and third-person) plus Tenebrae's and Ethelmer's comments upon and dreams about it. The volume that Tenebrae and Ethelmer examine together is one of many published in the 'Ghastly Fop' series, an invented (?) eighteenth-century popular fiction series mixing sex, death, and adventures featuring an aristocrat-rake who is also a ghost (526-27). Rather, Eliza's story is being 'read' in a separate volume by Tenebrae and Ethelmer, two young listeners in Cherrycoke's usual audience. Cherrycoke's history of Mason and Dixon that has shaped the novel for over 500 pages.

On the next page (526) we discover that this narrative is mysteriously not part of either the oral or the written version of the Rev. Eliza then later joins the camp of workers accompanying Mason and Dixon surveying their Line creating the Pennsylvania/Maryland border: again, by chance or by design and, if the latter, whose?Ĭhapter 54 opens with Eliza Fields's first-person narrative of her stay in Quebec it is the first time she has told her story directly (in 53 it was narrated in the third person). These two chapters appear to be Pynchon's version of one of the most popular colonial American narrative forms, the captivity narrative: Eliza is captured by the Indians and then 'escorted' by them to Quebec City and the Jesuits (by chance, or because the Indians have been commissioned to bring her by the Jesuits?).

A new figure, unnamed, is central she later is discovered to be named Eliza Fields. Chapter 53 opens by signaling itself as a clear break in the narrative, as Mason and Dixon take a Winter break from drawing their Line and the Reverend Cherrycoke tale-telling takes a break as well. On Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon, Part 1įirst, some quick summaries of the 'Captive's Tale' interlude in chapters 53-54 of Mason and Dixon, plus chapter 56, which gives us a crucial analogy to use to consider the Captive's Tale.

Mason and dixon novel