Infinite Summer

Interesting thoughts on this thread about Mario and his potential as a sort of "transformative" character who is perhaps more in tune (in his way) with the world than most of the other characters. I've heard the playwright August Wilson speak of what he called "spectacle characters" in his work, characters that were often marked as outcasts by the world at large but end up bringing others together, healing the disconnections. We'll see if Mario functions this way...

There's also an old Hollywood adage (along the lines of 'the butler did it') that it's 'always the gimp.'

The Usual Suspects for example.

On another note drawing on Hamlet, maybe he's the one that survives to tell the tail (via video camera), much like Horatio.

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First read.
Reading on Kindle and iPhone.

I look at Mario as someone who has a whole different categorizing system than other characters in the novel. He seems at times to have a real deep grip (pg. 84 where he envisions a flag pole being raised to twice it's height while Schtitt is talking) that has an almost Lao Tzu quiet-surface-but-deep-as-an-ocean quality to it, yet at other times he seems to be wandering left field looking for dandelions when the rest of the team is concentrating on the bottom of the 9th bases loaded part of the world (where is that gosh darn tripod and why are you fumbling in my pants USS M?). What I'm saying is that Mario just might be in here to help us flip our perspective around and consider what merits there are to alternative systems of making value judgments about the world. It's almost like Mario is a plant and the rest of the characters are animals; Mario lets the world come to him, the others go chasing after the world. That's probably not the best analogy, but hopefully it communicates some semblance of what I mean.