Las Nalgas is a coastal destination in the novel’s account of a student escape, where Weed Atman brings a small group to safety and where they reach Rex Snuvvle’s home. The scene gives this otherwise sparsely described shore a specific narrative function: it is the endpoint of a hurried route from campus and the setting for an encounter with Rex’s politically charged private world.

Setting and Arrival

After students called for someone to lead them out, they chose to follow Atman, who initially protested that he was simply tall. Still shaken by an epiphany about the forces of law and order, he guided them without deliberation, moving behind the Greg Noll Laboratory and the Olympic Auditorium. Most of the students then went their own ways; a smaller group stayed with him and eventually reached the shore at Las Nalgas and Rex Snuvvle’s house.

The narrative identifies Las Nalgas as a shore but offers little physical description of it. Its defining feature in this episode is instead its place at the end of a route through campus: a group seeking escape reaches the coast, while the crowd that had followed Atman breaks apart, leaving only a few to continue with him.

Rex Snuvvle’s Home and Political Context

The arrival brings the students to the home of Rex Snuvvle, a graduate student in Southeast Asian Studies. Rex had struggled to avoid learning the truth about the Vietnam War while being taught its official version; once he knew more, he was afraid to speak openly about it because he feared retaliation. He had become absorbed in the fate of the Vietnamese Bolshevik-Leninist Group, whose members had disappeared after being trained and sent to Indochina. In secret correspondence with a handful of exiles in Paris, Rex had come to regard them as the only authentic Vietnamese revolutionaries, betrayed by other political parties.

Rex’s house thus marks more than a stopping place after the escape. It is the point where the students’ arrival intersects with his effort to make sense of a revolutionary history obscured by official accounts. His idealization of the missing activists—as a lost community whose cause might still return as a prophetic voice or a rescue mission—contrasts with the immediate, practical act that has brought Atman and the students to his door.