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Flor da lee. Flor da lee. God save the king. Come on up honeybunch lonesome wanta try something new parley vous fransays? A gallon of red wine like water and sourdough bread and maybe please god I find an American girl who don't talk heathen languages.

This passage appears in Chapter xiv, at the end of Joe's long memory of prostitutes and women he has been with—a memory he experiences while his regular day nurse is masturbating him in an effort to alleviate whatever is making him tap his head. The chapter ends with a depiction of wartime Paris, which Joe had visited while on leave. The technique of the prose here is slightly different than the stream of consciousness used in most of the novel. Rather than of rendering Joe's thoughts as they come, this section reads as more of a montage—an impressionistic array intended to relay the feeling of Joe's time in Paris rather than a realistic plot line. This passage addresses the loneliness that Joe felt then, remembered through his current loneliness, and how both moments of loneliness were, for better or worse, momentarily alleviated by sex. This passage also points to Joe's underlying patriotism, or identification with his country. This patriotism works against much of what Joe argues in the novel, yet it remains as a contradictory force.

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