Gravity's Rainbow

Most people weren’t ready for Gravity’s Rainbow when Viking Press published it in 1973. Like that crowd, I wasn’t ready when I first read it at 19. I was no better prepared the second time at 30. It finally clicked on my third reading at 43. While I’m marginally more intelligent than I was back then, patience proved the differentiating factor. This time I read slowly, reread difficult passages, took notes, and spent time researching the novel’s countless references.

Attempts to describe Gravity’s Rainbow inevitably fall short. Its sprawling narrative loses its apparent protagonist three-quarters of the way through. Pynchon introduces somewhere between 300 and 400 characters. The novel ranges from Poisson distributions and Pavlovian psychology to a character modeled on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and a glass dildo filled with baby piranhas swimming in violet liquid. Unsurprisingly, scholars have written dozens of books on Pynchon, many devoted entirely to Gravity’s Rainbow.

People often ask what Gravity’s Rainbow is about. That’s hard to answer. Try this: Set during the final months of World War II and the immediate aftermath, the novel revolves around two mysteries. Tyrone Slothrop, an American lieutenant stationed in London, discovers a correlation between his sexual encounters and the impact sites of German V-2 rockets. As he tries to uncover why, he learns that he may have been the subject of psychological and chemical experiments as an infant. At the same time, intelligence agencies, military officers, scientists, former Nazis and the enigmatic Schwarzkommando all pursue a mysterious V-2 rocket bearing the serial number 00000. As Slothrop follows clues across the ruins of postwar Europe, these two mysteries converge, revealing a world shaped by paranoia, technology and corporate power..

But reducing Gravity’s Rainbow to its plot is like reducing Moby-Dick to a whale hunt. The story is important, and often laugh-out-loud funny. Yet it mainly serves as a framework on which Pynchon hangs countless ideas. I’ll explore a few of those ideas later, but first I want to highlight the moments I enjoyed so much that I reread them several times.

Best Song

Nearly all of Pynchon’s novels contain songs or song lyrics. Some are sweet, others crude, and still others completely absurd. The award for Best Song goes to “Too Soon to Know.” Slothrop sings it when he and Katje become romantically involved in the novel’s second section. It’s easy to imagine Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin belting it out before a small café crowd, tie loosened and cigarette in hand. The exciting uncertainty of new love has rarely sounded so good on paper.

Too Soon to Know (Fox-Trot)

It's still too soon,
It's not as if we'd kissed and kindled,
Or chased the moon
Through midnight's hush, as dancing dwindled
Into quiet dawns,
Over secret lawns…

Too soon to know
If all that breathless conversation
A sigh ago
Was more than casual flirtation
Doomed to drift away
Into misty gray…

How can we tell,
What can we see?
Love works its spells in hiding,
Quite past our own deciding...

So who's to say
If joyful love is just beginning,
Or if its day
Just turned to night, as Earth went spinning?
Darling, maybe so–
It's TOO SOON TO KNOW.

An unnamed song in the novel’s final section ranks second on my list. Roger Mexico meets several other characters in a pub and gets schooled on They-systems versus We-systems. The idea is that We-systems can form the basis of a counterforce against whatever paranoid conspiracy you’re fighting. Here too, it doesn’t take much imagination to hear Bob Dylan, or some lesser-known folk singer, leading a resistance anthem while the audience joins in on the refrain: “And it isn’t a resistance, it’s a war.”

They've been sleeping on your shoulder,
They've been crying in your beer,
And They've sung you all Their sad lullabies,
And you thought They wanted sympathy and didn't care
    for souls,
And They never were about to put you wise.
But I'm telling you today,
That it ain't the only way,
And there's shit you won't be eating any more--
They've been paying you to love it,
But the time has come to shove it,
And it isn' t a resistance, it's a war.

Light one up before you mosey out that door,
Once you cuddled 'em and kissed 'em,
But we're bringin' down Their system,
And it isn't a resistance, it's a war....

Best Line

Pynchon often writes difficult prose. Walls of text, sprawling lists and abrupt shifts in perspective demand patience. But he also rewards readers with moments of depth and beauty.

Arguably his most famous line appears here: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” It perfectly captures the paranoia running beneath almost every page of the novel.

Sappy though it may be, my favourite passage comes from Roger Mexico’s reflections on Jessica Swanlake and the thought of losing her after the war:

"You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are “yours” and which are “mine.” It’s past sorting out. We’re both being someone new now, someone incredible. . . "

Best Gag

Gravity’s Rainbow is absurd on almost every level. Strange things happen that sound ridiculous out of context but somehow fit naturally into the novel’s strange logic. More often than not, they’re also saying something deeper.

One example comes early in the novel. Webley, a largely forgettable janitor at the White Visitation, imagines the laboratory mice growing to human size and bursting into song with him in a moment of shared freedom. The daydream quickly collapses: “Now it’s back to the gages and the rationalized forms of death — death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowledge that it will die…” It’s a perfect example of Pynchon balancing comedy with philosophical weight.

My favourite gag, though, isn’t especially meaningful. It’s simply hilarious. Slothrop escapes to Berlin in a hot-air balloon that its pilot, Schnorp, is using to smuggle custard pies. Major Marvy gives chase in an ageing reconnaissance plane. The aerial battle ends when Slothrop disables the plane’s engine with a perfectly aimed custard pie.

Best Scene

Looking back through my notes, it’s impossible to pick a single best scene, so I’m calling it a tie.

The first comes in Episode 53. Pirate Prentice dreams of Hell. Following an endless ball of taffy from room to room, he eventually reaches a trailer marked “Devil’s Advocate.” Inside, Father Rapier—modeled in part on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—argues that once systems of technological control become sufficiently large and interconnected, freedom ceases to exist. “The word has ceased to have meaning.”

Rapier then turns to one of the novel’s central ideas: They. Pynchon never defines who They are, but they seem to represent the politicians, governments, corporations and technocrats who shape history from behind the curtain. Rapier even raises the chilling possibility that we die because They need us to. It’s one of the clearest expressions of the paranoia that permeates the novel.

The second scene comes in Episode 32. After a madcap chase, Slothrop returns to his room, passing through a grand hall of mahogany, green baize, maroon velvet loops, silver bells with ebony handles and Empire chairs. He feels the lingering presence of the power that once occupied the room until he finally blurts out: “‘Fuck you,’ whipsers Slothrop. It’s the only spell he knows, and a pretty good all-purpose one at that.” The line feels less like Slothrop speaking than Pynchon himself raising a middle finger to the institutions that haunt the entire novel.

Freedom in Gravity’s Rainbow

Pynchon questions the nature of freedom throughout Gravity’s Rainbow. The question seems to be whether we’re really free. While I recognized the thread throughout the novel, reading Herman and Weisenburger’s Gravity's Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom provided context through analysis and exploration of the source material that inspired Pynchon. 

Enrich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom clearly informed Pynchon’s views. Fromm explored the concepts of freedom from and freedom to. For Fromm, freedom from means liberation from external authority.Historically, that meant religion, family, social structures. Modern society dismantled many of those authorities. In turn, people became “free.”

That gives people freedom to become what they wish to become. A genuinely free person can think independently, love others without dependence, work creatively and act according to convictions rather than social pressure. Freedom is a sort of psychological achievement. Yet that achievement remains out of reach for most people. 

Fromm argues that most people do not know what to do with that freedom. It becomes a burden. In turn, they seek an escape from the anxiety that freedom brings. Fromm identifies three forms of escape: authoritarianism whereby people seek to submit themselves to a powerful leader, institution, or ideology. The second is destructiveness whereby people may attempt to destroy the world around them. The third is automaton conformity where individuals gradually adopt the values, tastes, ambitions, and opinions of the surrounding culture until they become almost indistinguishable from everyone else.

The clearest example in Gravity’s Rainbow cuts through as authoritarianism in Episode 66. Thanatz meets the mysterious “175s,” a secluded community of homosexual former prisoners from the Dora concentration camp. Although liberated, they remain psychologically trapped by the camp and have recreated its SS hierarchy, complete with imaginary officers, runners, and command structure. The burden of freedom led the 175s to recreate their oppression.

Another take on freedom comes from Isiah Berlin, who spoke of negative liberty (the absence of interference) and positive liberty (the freedom to become). Where Fromm approaches freedom primarily as a psychological achievement. Berlin approaches it primarily as a political one. For Berlin, factors including poverty, ignorance and propaganda hinder efforts of self realization. It seems Fromm is more concerned with authenticity while Berlin is focused on self-government.

Throughout the novel, Slothrop lacks negative liberty because other people are constantly interfering in his life. Intelligence agencies follow him, exchange information about him, manipulate his movements, and treat him less as a person than as an object of investigation. Even when he appears to be wandering freely through the Zone, there is a lingering sense that invisible organizations remain interested in him.

But the more disturbing loss is his positive liberty. If Laszlo Jamf really conditioned Slothrop’s sexual responses in infancy, then his desires are not entirely his own.  The question ceases to be, “Who is stopping Slothrop?” and becomes, “Who is making Slothrop want what he wants?” 

Genocide in Gravity’s Rainbow

One surprise is that Gravity’s Rainbow never focuses directly on the Holocaust. The genocide of Europe’s Jews hangs over the novel, but usually remains just beyond the edge of the page. Instead, Pynchon places it within a much longer history of colonial violence. The extermination of the Herero in German South West Africa becomes particularly important, linking Germany’s colonial ambitions with the technological and bureaucratic mindset that later returned to Europe. Elsewhere he reminds us that no nation emerges innocent. Russians, Americans, Dutch, British. Every empire carries its own history of conquest and extermination.

This broader perspective reinforces one of Pynchon’s central arguments. The Second World War was not an historical anomaly. It was the logical expression of systems that had already been operating for centuries. The same machinery that produces rockets, corporations and bureaucracies is also capable of producing genocide. The names change. The underlying systems remain.

Technology and Progress in Gravity’s Rainbow

In episode 40, Pynchon references the dream through which Kekulé realized the composition of the benzene molecule. The passage criticizes the pursuit of profit at any cost, especially the cost of using finite materials from nature.

“Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.”

Profit powers that cycle. Individuals and corporations want more and will sacrifice anything to succeed. We encounter a related idea in Episode 50 when Enzian rides through Hamburg and sees a ruined refinery landscape. The refinery itself appears to be in working order. Enzian wonders whether the Rocket may only be a decoy text, while the real “Text” is IG Farben, oil, plastics, energy networks, corporate interlocks and the hidden systems of power that outlive the war. The war, in this vision, was not really political. 

“It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted… secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology… by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, ‘Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,’ but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more… The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms — it was only stage to look that way — but among different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite…”

A third example comes earlier in the novel via The White Visitation. With the end of the war approaching, Pointsman finds himself increasingly anxious. During the war his Pavlovian research enjoyed money, personnel and a steady supply of experimental subjects, especially dogs. Yet Pointsman recognises that victory threatens to dismantle the very system that has made his work possible.

Here and elsewhere throughout Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon points to the costs of pursuing endless growth and technological progress. Those costs are often measured not simply in money, but in landscapes destroyed and human lives consumed.

The Elect and the Preterite in Gravity’s Rainbow

Throughout Gravity’s Rainbow, the Elect and the Preterite refers to a theological concept popularized in Calvinism. According to traditional Calvinist doctrine, the Elect refers to a specific, limited number of people that God chose for salvation before the creation of the world. The Preterite are those who were passed over. 

Pynchon turns this into a social critique in Episode 54. Sothorp’s oldest ancestor, William Slothrop, becomes attached to pigs while driving them to the slaughterhouse. He began waiting for the one pig that wouldn’t die to validate all the ones that had. He reads all of it as a parable and writes about it in On Preterition, which becomes heresy.

William’s heresy is that he sees the passed-over majority as holy in their own way. In On Preterition, he argues that the elect could not exist without the “second Sheep,” the passed-over ones who make election meaningful.

If the saved few depend on the damned many, then maybe the many are more like Christ than the elect because they bear the cost. William pushes this even further by pairing Jesus and Judas. If everything in Creation has an equal and opposite counterpart, then Jesus must have one too. Judas is to the preterite what Jesus is to the elect. 

“William felt that what Jesus was for the elect, Judas Iscariot was for the Preterite. Everything in the Creation has its equal and opposite counterpart. How can Jesus be an exception? could we feel for him anything but horror in the face of the unnatural, the extracreational? Well, if he is the son of man, and if what we feel is not horror but love, then we have to love Judas too. Right?”

You can tie this to Father Rapier’s sermon in Episode 53. Once again, Father Rapier speaks of a They who appear to be immortal. “It is possible that They will not die.” he says. “To believe that each of Them will personally die is also to believe that Their system will die—that some chance of renewal, some dialectic, is still operating in History. To affirm Their mortality is to affirm Return. I have been pointing out certain obstacles in the way of affirming Return . . .”

Father Rapier’s sermon echoes the same idea. His mysterious “They” represent those who appear to stand above history itself. “It is possible that They will not die.” Rapier isn’t suggesting literal immortality. Rather, systems of power continually renew themselves. Governments fall. Corporations merge. Wars end. Yet the structures that separate the elect from the preterite survive. Individuals disappear, but the machinery remains.

Patterns and Randomness in Gravity’s Rainbow

Patterns provide the lifeblood of Gravity’s Rainbow. We learn early on that there exists a correlation between Slothrop’s sexual adventures and V-2 impact sides. Roger Mexico believes it’s random, pointing to Poisson distributions as a proof point. Pointsman believes there’s a correlation. This speaks to a larger question: Is life a series of patterns or is it all random? 

Pynchon plays both sides. One short quote on randomness stands out: “Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.” 

That’s also how Gravity’s Rainbow works. On first reading, the novel often feels almost random. Characters disappear. Stories wander. Conversations dissolve into songs or hallucinations. Yet the longer you spend with it, the more hidden connections begin to emerge. Patterns appear everywhere, even if they never resolve into certainty. Few writers have been better at making chaos feel simultaneously accidental and deeply interconnected.

Systems in Gravity’s Rainbow

Throughout the novel, individuals believe they’re making choices, pursuing ambitions or exercising free will. Yet Pynchon repeatedly pulls back the curtain to reveal larger systems shaping those choices. Governments, armies, corporations, technologies, ideologies and bureaucracies all develop lives of their own. The people inside them become interchangeable. They may think they’re in control, but they’re often just serving forces they barely understand.

This is why Pynchon keeps returning to the mysterious “They.” He never defines who They are because They aren’t any one person or organization. They are the systems that survive long after individuals disappear. Wars end, politicians die, companies collapse and scientists retire, but the machinery carries on.

The Rocket is perhaps the novel’s greatest symbol because it sits at the centre of all those systems. It is a weapon, a technological achievement, a corporate product, a military objective, a psychological obsession and, ultimately, a kind of secular god. Nearly every major character orbits it, not because of the rocket itself, but because of the vast network of power that created it.