As strange as it is, I keep thinking about the relationship between shit and waste. I keep coming back to the ever worsening shit that came from going deeper into the USSR. For whatever reason this reminded me so much of the best description of why communism didn't work that I've ever heard --

my friend Dan from home asked his father during the fall of the Berlin Wall (so he was like 5) what communism was. His dad responded that "communism is when you go to the store to buy toilet paper but you can't because they only have TVs".

Now this might have absolutely no relation to the novel but I know Delillo does touch on the ways in which the communist government was out of touch with the people's needs.

As I was walking back to the dorms just now, I was thinking more about the passage the final group presented on page 291, in which Slothrop figures out he was sold as a child to IG:

"He knows what the smell has to be: though according to these papers it would have been too early for it..."

I was reminded that Freud's stages of child development include an anal phase, immediately following the oral phase we experience during infancy. The theory is that during the oral phase, we seek out our mother's breasts, and explore with our mouths for love and approval. We then progress to the anal phase, which is about CONTROL- we learn to control (or not) our bowels and exert some authority via our ability to shit.