Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow is a novel published by Thomas Pynchon in 1973, set in Europe near the end of World War II during the end of 1944 and much of 1945. It features the creation of the first military rockets as a main theme and dispenses with many of the traditional elements of plot and character development.

The novel is regarded by some as one of the great postmodern works of 20th century literature, but many others have declared it unreadable.

It was unanimously voted by the three-member Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction for the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. However, the other eleven members of the fourteen-member Pulitzer board overturned this decision, calling the book "unreadable," "turgid," "overwritten," and "obscene," with at least one member confessing to not having gotten more than a third of the way through the book.

The plot is complex, involving the V-2 rocket and Operation Paperclip, IG Farben, Standard Oil, parapsychology and conspiracy theories, drawing heavily on themes that Pynchon had probably encountered at his work as a technical writer for Boeing, where he worked on the Minuteman missile.

Gravity's Rainbow is in four parts, each made up of a number of episodes whose divisions are marked by a series of squares (it has been suggested that these represent sprocket holes as in a reel of film). Each part opens with its own title and opening quotation:

Beyond The Zero
Un Perm au Casino Hermann Goering
In The Zone
The Counterforce

It is often difficult to fathom out the plot of the book and its direction, particularly as a main plot line does not emerge until the second part of the book; the lengthy first part effectively acts as an introduction.

Table of contents

1 Plot
2 Quotes
3 External links

Plot

Warning: Wikipedia contains spoilers

The main narrative thread (in as far as there being one) concerns a promiscuous US army lieutenant named Tyrone Slothrop. In "Beyond The Zero", it's noted by some of the other characters and organisations of the book that each of Slothrop's sexual encounters precedes a V-2 rocket hit in the same place by several days.

He is studied covertly and sent away by superiors in mysterious circumstances to the Hermann Goering casino. From there he escapes into the coalescing Zone of Europe at the end of the war, searching for a rocket known as the 00000 and a plastic component made out of the hithereto unknown platic Imipolex G, known as the S-Ger�t. His quest continues for some time "In The Zone" but Slothrop is repeatedly sidetracked until he fragments in part four.

At the end of "The Counterforce", the text stops with a completely obliteration of narrative in a rocket blast; it transpires that the S-Ger�t is actually a capsule crafted to contain a human, and rocket 00000 has already been launched with the S-ger�t and a bound captive on board, in a pseudosexual act of human sacrifice.

Gravity's Rainbow is available in paperback under ISBN 0140188592 and ISBN 0140283382.

Quotes

"In the static space of the architect, he might've used a double integral now and then, early in his career, to find volumes under surfaces whose equations are known -- masses, moments, centers of gravity. But it's been years since he's had to do with anything that basic...in the dynamic space of the living Rocket, the double integral has a different meaning. To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled....'Meters per second' will integrate to 'meters'. The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It will never fall."

"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."

"Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking is done on paper...."