47 pages • 1 hour read

V.

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1963

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-10

Chapters 11-13

Chapter 14-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Men’s Perception of Women

Women play a crucial role in V. but they rarely express themselves on their own terms. In the novel’s settings, late-19th-century Cairo and mid-20th-century New York, women lack the social and political power of men, an imbalance that every storyline examines.

Benny Profane can only understand women through the lens of his neuroses. Fina, Rachel, and Paola all declare their affection for Profane, but he cannot bring himself to love anyone who could ever love him. His patriarchal environment deepens his alienation from women, who he barely sees as human beings, and instead perceives as manifestations of his internal contradictions. Profane craves women’s attention, but his only concept of this is drunken bar pickups—he rejects emotional intimacy, weighed down by self-hatred and projecting that loathing onto those society has untrustworthy triggers of male anxiety.

Stencil’s search for V. both elevates and dehumanizes women. While his sustained attention and conviction that V.’s identity holds some deeper important truth seems to position him above his era’s sexism, the fact that he sees V. in any number of women, places, code words, and so on, makes it clear that for him, V. is not a person. Stencil’s V. holds the same level of significance whether she turns out to be Victoria Wren, Veronica Manganese, Vera Meroving, or Venezuela—what appears to be more meaningful is the visual gag of V.’s shifting initials, which always take the form of other V-shaped letters (sometimes upside down). The geometry of orthography is a bigger deal than V.’s inner life.

V.’s desire to rebuild her body using inanimate prosthetic parts is accurate. In this sense can also be read in two different ways. Possibly, V. is rejecting the male gaze, unwilling to acquiesce to social pressure about how she should look and act. Instead, she remakes her outer appearance to reflect her internal self. In this interpretation, her quasi-lesbian relationship with Melanie also heralds a rejection of the patriarchy. However, prosthetic limbs also make V. an echo of the automatons dancing around Melanie—idealized female forms completely devoid of inner life and instead simple projections of male desire.

Existing at the End of History

In keeping with the tropes of Postmodernism, the world depicted in V. has little hope for the future. After the 20th century’s brutal events—from violent riots in Florence, to the genocide of the Herero people, to the Siege of Malta, to WWI, WWII and the Holocaust—a patchwork trauma transforms society into a dead end, devoid of meaning and capable only of generating self-satire. The lingering effects of these violent episodes are still present in the world; Yoyodyne began as a toy company, and then became a nefarious supplier of military equipment. The crimes of the past are unaddressed and too numerous to ever deal with in any reasonable manner. As such, all that remains is the trauma, guilt, and the sense that history has ended.

For the Whole Sick Crew, this postmodern alienation manifests as a complete rupture from society. Rather than making art, they get blackout drunk, affecting a detached ironic cool, indicating a helpless nihilism. Even those on the margins of this group, like Profane and Rachel, share the same disaffection, though neither fully gives in. Profane seeks connection with the inhuman, as he attempts to befriend sewer alligators and exploited crash test dummies—both images of powerless, marginalized groups preyed on in ways that echo the brutal history everyone is trying to repress. Rachel also craves connection, becoming a maternal figure to Esther and Paola.

The past becomes a comforting force at the end of history. Every character relentlessly pursues nostalgia: Profane returns to his parents’ empty home, Stencil pores over his father’s diaries, Schoenmaker seeks an idealized man from his past, Foppl prostrates himself before his fascist commanding officer, and Paola offers to return to her estranged husband. The only character seemingly trying to find a way forward is V. and that progress involves the dehumanizing replacement of body parts with prosthetics and shifting into different people. The problem with retreating into the past is that memories are unreliable, subject to forgetfulness or traumatized repression. For example, Stencil’s investigation into events in Egypt attempts to align eight perspectives of what happened—an impossible task that makes history a subjective collage. Feeling trapped, characters are held hostage by false memories of their past selves and the relentless pursuit of nostalgia.

The Animate and the Inanimate

The novel plays with the dichotomy between the animate and inanimate, daring readers to question where the boundary between the two lies.

Social alienation has had a profoundly destructive effect on Profane. The more alienated he becomes, the more he rejects the people who try to get close to him, and the more he instead gravitates to communion with the inanimate, until the only beings he can talk to are alligators, rats, test dummies, and objects. Profane’s humanity is slipping away from him, and he does not know how to bring it back.

The novel’s doctors also reach toward the inanimate, in their case, for aesthetic ends. Schoenmaker justifies remodeling Esther’s nose over and over again with oblique references to an inner Esther that is waiting to come out. After cosmetic surgery, Esther’s original nose has been replaced by an artificially manufactured one—something Schoenmaker wants to repeat, to create an idealized, inorganic version of Esther out of her animate self. Similarly, the dentist Eigenvalue keeps a set of bejeweled dentures—a replication so far removed from real teeth as to be a parody, as the dentures are no longer functional except as art.

V. takes this motif to its extreme, replacing her legs, arms, and hair with prosthetics, body after body. V. actively seeks out this dehumanizing dis-animation as a solution to the problem of longevity, historical significance, and the desire to transcend the human. V.’s artificial parts are invested with their own animate quality, living lives outside of their service to her person, as Stencil finds when he hunts for any hint of the Bad Priest’s limbs in Malta. The tension between animate and inanimate is not simply a contrast between organic and inorganic. Rather, it is a desperate search for identity in an alienated world, prompting the audience to ask what makes us human.