Word: dwarfed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DeLillo plunks this passive protagonist down in a futuristic think tank called Field Experiment No. 1. His task, to decode a series of radio pulses being received from the vicinity of a G dwarf designated as Ratner's Star. Billy is soon accosted by a parade of scientists and deep thinkers. Their names (Shlorno Glottic, Grbk, Orang Mohole, Desilu Espy, Hoy King Toy) seem to peg them as refugees from Thomas Pynchon's Central Casting. Their inevitable behavior - alternately cerebral and cloacal - confirms the identification...
...incorporative stage, is a person who cannot positively relate ..." The doctor's narrow Freudian couch allows no room to turn around. Versions that do not accord with orthodox analysis are jettisoned; Disney's version of Snow White, for example, is psychologically useless to the child because each dwarf has a separate name and a distinctive personality. This "seriously interferes with the unconscious understanding that they symbolize an immature, pre-individual form of existence which [the heroine] must transcend...
...technical production staged by producers Denise Moorehead and Mercedes Laing is magnificent. Glenn Berenbeim's set is amazingly versatile and visually amazing. At times the tech is too much stronger than the acting it supports; the moving platform upstages the court as much as their ornate boxes dwarf them. The costumes, designed by Berenbeim and executed by Lynn Rodriguez, are beautifully distinct and salvage a few scenes; without the gaudy accoutrements of their offices, the court characters would be a homogenous disaster. The tech as a whole bypasses the usual primitive motifs seen in The Blacks and opts instead...
...when you're sober and shaking from the vibes of that fifth-of-a-century mile-stone roaring up over the hill and down towards you in a Big Mack diesel dribbling lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise and ashes from a three-foot seegar all over the steaming tar pavement and dwarf pine trees, about to blow you off the road and ream out your Youthwagon--that's no time for a country song--that's the time for whipping a Ueey and glueing the gas pedal to the floor board and beating ol' Mack to 21 and beyond...
AMIS USES A variety of devices to maintain a sense of alienation between the reader and the action. The least successful of these are the narrator's occasional clumsy interjections. For example, when Keith, the dwarf, contemplates his feet bloodied by the nails which protrude from his makeshift elevator shoes, the narrator intrudes with, "Well, we're sorry about it Keith, of course, but we're afraid that you simply had to be that way. Nothing personal, please understand--merely in order to serve the designs of this particular fiction...